The following is a transcript of our podcast conversation with Sarah Wilkins and Emily Ullberg. You can listen to the full episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Sarah Wilkins
Hello and welcome to Humans Beyond Resources, an HR podcast by Reverb where we cover topics from culture to compliance. Reverb believes that every decision a leader makes reverberates throughout the organization, from hiring your first employee to training your entire workforce. We believe in building healthy, inclusive cultures that engage your team. I’m your host, Sarah Wilkins.
Thank you to our Humans Beyond Resources podcast sponsors, Parker Smith and Feek, AHT, and Joshua Briningham of Carney, Badely, and Spelman.
We’re talking about leave administration. We have Emily from Sparrow joining us. So, Emily, why don’t you introduce yourself and then we’ll kind of dive into some of the questions that we had started to brainstorm.
Emily Ullberg
My name’s Emily Ulberg. I’m an account executive at a company called Sparrow. Sparrow does full -service, end -to -end, leave -of -absence administration. We’re a high -tech, high -touch platform, so excited to talk through some of that today. My experience with Sparrow started about two and a half years ago when I actually went on a leave my own at a former company. And we were pretty small at that time. and they only had about 10 employees in the U .S. And the leave was not handled very well. Looking back at it now, I see that they were trying their best. They had no idea what they were doing, but the information they communicated to me was, we’ll do everything we need to do to stay compliant. Not we’ll do everything we need to do to support you. It was, we’re gonna stay compliant, which at 10 employees means almost nothing. So it was a really enlightening experience for me, and at that time, while I was out welcoming my new daughter, I had a lot of time to kind of reflect and say, oh, what kind of a company do I want to work for? I really don’t feel valued after the experience I just went through. And so I discovered Sparrow, a company that does leave of absence administration in a way that makes employees feel really valued, that benefits companies, and it sounded like a win -win -win. And so I’m really excited to just talk about how complicated leave can be and how to do it better for companies of any size.
Sarah Wilkins
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining. I mentioned when we were preparing for this, that I have had many conversations and just this week, another conversation about a company who, you know, their process is, is kind of complicated and a little bit off and there’s issues with payroll accuracy and employee experience, as you mentioned, and all sorts of things. And so it’s often well meaning and we’re trying to do the right things, but because it’s so complicated, it can be hard. So kind of want to dive in today. Let’s start by talking about the fact that there’s so many various different leave programs and the fact that so many companies now are employing people all over the US. How are you finding HR teams being able to manage the leave administration process since there’s no consistent paid leave program at a federal level and each state that does have a leave program may be done a little bit differently, administered a little differently?
Emily Ullberg
Yeah, it’s a mess. If you’re feeling like leave is complicated at your organization, you are absolutely in your right mind. It’s a lot. And I think part of this is coming because there are two fourths kind of going at the same time. One is leave laws are increasing. So California was the first one to pioneer this way back in 2004. It took a while for other states to catch up. New Jersey was the second one in 2009. There are now 14 states that either have paid leave live now or have it coming up in the next couple of years. Oregon and Colorado just recently launched theirs. the ones we have coming down the pike are Maine, Maryland, Delaware, and Minnesota, our first Midwestern state to going to be offer paid family leave. And with that was the big push to remote work through COVID. So when pre -COVID, a lot of companies, they were in office, everyone was pretty close by, you may have had the remote employee here or there. And then when we went remote first in COVID, a lot of people and a lot companies decided to stay that way. Now a lot of organizations are hiring remote first or they have kind of a hybrid office. Now organizations are dealing with a much wider spread of an employee footprint than they had before. Maybe they used to have employees in two states, now they have employees in 32 states. And when with the employees with the legislative landscapes we have right now there’s four laws related to leave of absence at the federal state and local or municipal level. So if you have people in 30 states, that’s more than 300 laws for lean HR teams to keep up with. So if you have one benefits admin or one HR operations person, that’s a huge compliance risk for them to keep up on these constantly changing laws. You mentioned not having a federal paid leave program. I honestly don’t think having a federal program will fix this in any way whatsoever. it’s just going to make it more complicated, right? Because there’s no way California, Washington, New York, New Jersey are going to be satisfied with whatever the federal legislation rolls out. Fed might be eight weeks, 12 weeks, we know other states are just going to up the ante. And so it’s just going to increase the level of complexity for everyone across the
Sarah Wilkins
board. Yeah, that is complicated. And are you finding that when people do have multiple states that they, and they’re managing it themselves, are they able to stay compliant?
Emily Ullberg
Most of the people I speak with say, you know what, I’m really scared I’m doing something wrong. This keeps me up at night. I just hope we don’t have a lawsuit. I hope we don’t have something else. So a lot more and more organizations are choosing to partner with outsourced HR consultancies to manage this, their disability carriers to manage it, or something like a Sparrow, which is really able to take it off of their plate 100 % and keep them compliant.
Sarah Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. So we talked about so many companies having employees across different states and all the various leave laws and things. What type of leave programs do you see them most commonly adopting, right? So if you have employees in Washington and maybe a state that doesn’t, you know, how are people managing across the global, you know, or the national footprint?
Emily Ullberg
Yeah, I think it varies based on company culture. Some organizations are just doing the bare minimum across the board, whatever the state requires me to do for that employee, I will do my hands are tied. Others, and I’m guessing many of them are on this call today, we’re working at organizations that are a little bit more forward thinking, a little bit more progressive. So they’re looking at, okay, which state is offering the maximum benefit for our employees, and let’s spread that across the board. So if California is offering 12, 14, 16 weeks. Let’s give everyone that same length of leave. Interestingly, it actually ends up creating some of an inequitable experience no matter what, because an employee taking leave in a state that has a paid family leave benefit versus someone that doesn’t, if they’re getting paid leave from their company, there’s going to be a lot more work that an employee in California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, et cetera, has to do that someone in Florida, Texas, et cetera, doesn’t. So even though there’s more protection, it’s more work for the employee, it’s more work for HR. So I think it warrants mentioning. You’re trying to create a really fair, really equitable, lovely experience for all of your employees across the board. Sparrow is actually able to make it so, regardless of whatever legislation is in place.
Sarah Wilkins
Yeah, that’s interesting. I didn’t think about that, but you would have somebody going to the Washington State paid leave program and filling things out and then having to send things back. And so it’s great from an employee experience standpoint, right? Because the big thing in this, having gone on a leave myself and having just the support shifts, you know, if it’s a parental leave or a caregiver leave of some sort, like you’ve got so many other things kind of on your mind or plate to take care of.
Emily Ullberg
We’re getting close to tax season and I think it’s pretty similar except it’s like having to do your taxes at the moment in your life when you’re suddenly under the most stress you’ve have ever been regardless whatever type of leave you’re taking even a parental leave very stressful and there aren’t a lot of resources in place for employees to do this on their own. Yeah absolutely and not have any surprises. Everyone’s got their own horror story if you don’t you’ve never touched a leave or known someone that’s taken a leave.
Sarah Wilkins
Yeah, well, let’s come back to some of these other things related to specifically parental leave. But I kind of want to talk, what we’ve talked about so far is a lot focused on maybe parental leave policies, but there are really so many different types of leave to consider in the full employee life cycle, right? So, um, it’s not just, you know, having or adopting a child, but there are aging parents or, you know, for caregiving or other types of things. So as a company, what should I be, you know, what types of leaves should we maybe highlight a little bit more and include in our policies?
Emily Ullberg
Yeah. And if this is something anyone on the call is actively thinking about, I have a really great resource that will be available in the show notes, Sparrow recently released our annual benchmarking report that discusses not only what types of leave a policy should include, also broken down by company size because companies of different sizes tend to offer different benefits, but also with the leaves you’re including, how long of a paid leave if you choose to offer one should it be? Some companies offer paid medical leaves, paid caregiver leaves, some of them, for some of them it’s two weeks, for some of them it could be eight weeks, 10 weeks, et cetera. So that benchmarking report is a super valuable resource for anyone that’s thinking about revising their policy or also wants to see about how their policy compares with others of the same company size, etc. To talk about the question, I want to also commend you for using the term parental leave instead of primary, secondary leave, maternity or paternity leave because this inclusive language also really matters. And if you are using other terms, I encourage you to think about what kind of a culture you are creating. So in terms of the other types of leave we see, parental leave does end up being the vast majority of leaves that we see. The other two, I would say, are typically medical leave and caregiving leave, especially with a rise in caregiving leaves. I think though they’re going to be increasing in the next 10 years or so, because we’re having the baby boomer generation come out of the workforce. And now this sandwich generation of people, both caring for new additions to their family, as well as caring for elderly and aging parents is increasing quite a bit. So definitely those are the big four. We would say parental leaves being both birthing and non -birthing parents, and then family and medical. but there are other types of leaves that are also increasing as well. Bereavement leaves, jury duty voting leaves, safe leave is a big one that’s trending now too as well as bone marrow and organ donation. I think bereavement leave is probably the most common one we see out of all of those other leaves and a really heartwarming legislation that we’ve seen very recently is the inclusion of pregnancy loss under that definition of bereavement leave. Both California and New York launched legislation in January of this year to cover
Sarah Wilkins
pregnancy loss as a form of bereavement leave. Yeah, I think that’s so important to consider or to include. And even if your state doesn’t require it, you know, including that in your bereavement leave policies can be really important. And then I think another thing I’ll highlight on bereavement leave in particular. We work with an organization called Banister Advisors and got some language around our bereavement leave policy to, again, try to make it more inclusive and make it to focus on close relationships because, you know, that family looks different for everyone, right? And I think traditional bereavement policies tend to focus on direct family, right? And so we wanna focus more on using language like close relationships. so people can use that time for those that are important to them, right? And it may not be a parent, a spouse, a child, but someone else important in your life.
Emily Ullberg
Absolutely. Other types of leave you might imagine, like, not covered under, like, legislation. There are really progressive forms of leave that I’m very excited about. I hope they catch on and we can create more of a groundswell. One is NICU leave. So you can imagine you have your child, they’re a preemie. you may end up spending your 12 weeks of FMLA, disability and bonding time in the NICU. And then what do you do? Are you supposed to come back to work immediately after that? There’s one company that we partner with at Sparrow whose parental leave doesn’t start until the family is home from the hospital. They have NICU leave until then, and then once they’re home from the hospital, the bonding time and disability time starts, which is amazing. Others are like grandparent leave. So if you’re still in the workforce and your son or daughter is having a child welcoming a new addition, it doesn’t quite qualify as a serious health condition under FMLA to take leave for someone else’s pregnancy.
Emily Ullberg
But there are some companies offering leave so that they can go care for the new child and welcome that family. Another one is menopause leave or increased leave for employees going through that process as well. So some really interesting progressive things happening out in the market.
Sarah Wilkins
Yeah, and we included something related to taking time off for menopause or severe, like, period -related things in our policies as well, just in making that more of a norm and, you know, making sure people know they’re supported, right, through the various life cycles while they’re at work, right? I’m curious on the caregiving leave in particular, if you have any stats of what people are on average are offering.
Emily Ullberg
One thing that’s top of mind is we’ve actually seen an increase in the length of leaves. So the same like approximate number of people are taking caregiver leaves, but people are staying out for longer. It used to be just a couple of weeks we’re seeing now people staying out for more five weeks is a lot more common. Non -birthing parental leave duration has also increased dramatically. Can imagine a couple of years ago, a decade ago when things were different, things were a little bit different. new fathers didn’t necessarily feel comfortable leading the workforce. Now that there’s increased legislation in place, there’s more cultural conversations. They feel more comfortable taking more of leave that’s available to them.
Sarah Wilkins
That’s good to hear. Cause I think that’s a big thing, right? Is having people in your company, leaders, other people like you that are actually utilizing the leaves. I think that was a problem that I saw at a prior company is people feeling like if they took the leave that they would be kind of thought differently of or rightly because no one else was taking it. And so I think that’s so important to see, to hear that people are actually, you know, it’s, there’s an increase in those people using it that maybe aren’t the birthing parent. So that’s good to hear. Yeah. And then in terms of duration of
Emily Ullberg
leave of paid leave, we’re seeing the ranges vary widely, which is interesting. Caregiver, we’re seeing some companies offer just a single week of paid leave. Others are offering 16 or 18 weeks and medical also anything from one to two weeks all the way to 25 plus weeks. So it varies
Sarah Wilkins
highly. And you mentioned safe time. Is that similar to like the sick and safe time say that the state of Washington requires? And so obviously there’s legislation, but are you seeing companies offer that when there’s not legislation as well? Yeah. So similar to some of the more
Emily Ullberg
generous companies where they just want to give everyone access to the most generous policies across the board instead of differentiating by state. They’ll try and streamline the administration by making it one policy across the board. We’ve talked a lot about the logistics of
Sarah Wilkins
leave and the various legislation. Another area that can cause strain for people going on leave is, you know, the team, the managers, the employee themselves, like how is their job going to be covered while they’re gone and those types of things. So what are some of the ways you’ve seen organizations handle this and make sure that the employee is well supported and feels good to take their leave and to come back in a less stressful way. And also that the team has, team and manager have support while maybe someone is out on leave.
Emily Ullberg
Yeah, I think it’s really important to treat someone taking leave with a lot respect and give them as much education around the process as you can because it’s very confusing. There’s a lot of legalities. What is job protection, right? What’s wage replacement? If I’m not on a leave that is job protected, should I be worried about my job? If I’m going to be out for three, four months, how does that impact my career goal? There are also compliance concerns for managers. This could be the first time they’re having anyone take a leave of absence. Do they know what they can say? What they can’t say? How often they can contact someone that’s out on leave? So there’s a lot of uncertainty there. And for some of the leaner people teams, what we see is they want to provide people with an amazing experience. They want to really hold someone’s hand through the process. So they’ll book lots of time, they’ll walk them through things. They’ll make spreadsheets, they’ll make templates to try and educate people about it. They’ll try and research as much as they can, try and find the state portal, and even call states on an employee’s behalf to try and get information for them. And the response they get from those paid family leave states is, oh, we can’t talk to you, we can only talk to the employee. So it’s a lot of effort, sometimes for not a lot of result, unfortunately. And so at Sparrow, what we do is we pair each employee with a dedicated leave specialist, a dedicated contact for the duration of their leave. So this is a person who’s a leave expert. They’re able to answer all the employee’s questions as well as contact the state portal, the disability carrier on the employee’s behalf, again, so they can focus on why they took leave in the first place. and then we also give managers additional resources, letting them know you have an employee that’s going to take a leave. What does that mean? What can you do? What can’t you do? And how can you enable that employee to be successful when they’re coming back? If they’ve been gone for a while, you may need to treat them like an almost new employee when they come back, right? Re -onboard them to any processes that have changed. If you’re in office, Make sure they have a desk, like a lot of things can fall through the cracks that have a real impact on the employee experience you’re creating. And so you want to ensure the employee feels supported and feels taken care of when they are choosing to come back to their company.
Sarah Wilkins
Yeah. I think those are all great points and especially like the transitioning back right into some other things that we see are partial ramp and times, right? So maybe not going 100 % back right away, but, you know, part time or kind of easing into the role. Yeah. And I think another thing is if you have the ability to put someone interim into a role, right, or give, you know, someone stretch assignment, just so that person that’s on leave doesn’t feel like stressed about leaving their role behind, or that there’s going to be important in things that aren’t gonna get done, and then they have to come back to something that has sat not being done for three months, or that there’s been too much put on the team, and there’s a lot of stress on the team when they come back, because they’ve been kind of managing a role and a half or something like that, right? And so I think that’s another important thing to consider is how you can use maybe like interim support to backfill for people that are on extended leaves. We find that that really can help, and just create a better employee experience and have much more retention of not just those on leave, but those that are still there and maybe picking up extra work. What else that we haven’t talked about that you would wanna highlight or just talk about like to make people aware?
Emily Ullberg
I think the pay component of leave can also be especially confusing. And there isn’t a lot of standardization between how companies do it. it feels like the wild west. Everyone’s doing stuff a little bit different. So if you have an employee, but the company offers a paid leave policy, eight weeks, 12 weeks, 20 weeks, two weeks, doesn’t matter what it is. If an employee is in a state that also offers paid family medical leave and or they’re getting a disability check claim as well, there are multiple sources of income and How do you manage that process? So we see a company managing it in about four different ways. One is they don’t do anything at all. They say, Hey, employee, we value you so, so, so, so much that we’re going to, we’re not going to make you go through the rigmarole of filing for disability for any state benefits that you’re applicable for, just go on leave and we’ll keep paying you. And when you come back, lovely, happy to have you and nothing has change from a payroll perspective. It could be getting in some trouble if someone’s leave just continues to extend, extend, extend. Also, there’s a lot of money being left on the table from an organizational standpoint in this economy, it doesn’t make sense to not maximize any source of wage replacement that’s available to an employee, but a lot of organizations doing this really want to take the best care of their employees, their assets. as they possibly can. So that’s one method. Paying, I highly do not recommend. If anyone is doing that now, please come talk to me. I will fix it for you. Another method I see is companies just paying their employees at 100 % of their salary, but asking them to share how much they have received from benefits. So still making them apply, but keeping them on salary while they’re out just so there’s no gaps in pay. Again, they want to have an amazing experience for the employee, but that also comes with risks, right? From a company perspective, what if the employee does not come back? Or what if the employee filed incorrectly? Instead of $30 ,000 in benefits that they were supposed to get, they only got 10. Are you gonna make up the difference each time? Those costs build up. And also, frankly, from an employee’s perspective, coming back from leave and then needing to write your company a giant check to reimburse them, also not great. That’s another method we see companies doing really not the best but it is quite common. The ideal method is to estimate how much the benefits are going to be, keep someone on payroll, but only pay them that top -up amount. So not overpaying, not underpaying, just pay them that Delta. The challenge with this is it can be pretty hard to calculate and know how much employees going to be receiving from other sources. In many states it’s based on previous work history and income and in some protective employee states which tend to be the ones that offer leave like I just keep harping on California because they were doing it first. You can’t ask an employee what they were previously paid so if you are a newer employer for them you may not know how much they’re going to be receiving from the state. So at best you’re making a guess but you’re going to end up having to reconcile anyway. So those same problems can still present themselves. And then the last way we see companies doing this is not paying an employee anything while they’re out on leave. You’re going out on leave. They stop payroll. Sarah, I saw your eyes go, whoa. It’s not, it’s not an ideal employee experience, but it does effectively prevent overpayment. So they stop it. They stopped payroll until someone confirmed how much benefits they received from another place, they share those with HR and payroll, who then makes up the difference very accurately, but not a great employee experience, especially when it can take so long to file and then receive benefits. These organizations don’t necessarily process things in the quickest way possible, so also not recommended.
Sarah Wilkins
It is a challenge. And yeah, I was just talking to a consultant this week, we met up and we were chatting about how he’s there to help fix their leave administration process right now. And they had this payroll issue and they were, you know, they their calculator wasn’t, they had some calculator they were using, it wasn’t clear how they got around to that and all of that, right. And so there were just so many kind of pay issues, which is also, you know, something with if you do have short term disability, and you’re paying too much, that can also get you in trouble, right, as far as kind of making up the difference in salaries and things like that. So, yeah, thanks for highlighting the payroll complexities in the various ways.
Emily Ullberg
And if you’re trying to make that estimate and do the top up payment the way is most recommended, it’s not an easy thing to do. State benefits payout on like a seven day week. If you have a, if you’re paying companies on a five day work week, you’re on a semi -monthly pay schedule, how do you square that circle, right? It’s so complicated. And then it’s really hard to chase down employees to get their notice of computation back to know how much they were actually paid out. So again, if you’re struggling with this, it’s okay. It’s really, really hard. If you want help, I’d love to have a conversation because Sparrow streamlines all of this. We make the payroll calculations. We can tell companies exactly what that pop -up needs to be on a payroll by payroll period basis based on their unique payroll schedules.
Sarah Wilkins
Yeah, I think you highlight, you know, communication being incredibly important, no matter how you’re managing this process and that like upfront communication, regular communication and making it clear how things are coming about, I think is so important. The transparency that you need to have in this. The other thing I was thinking about when you were talking was if you had any data related to like retention when, when, you know, leaves are handled, um, in a, you know, with an employee centric or employee kind of experience in mind, like how that improves maybe retention of people returning from a leave or things like that.
Emily Ullberg
Yeah. I, from my own personal experience, employee retention is huge. If you mishandle the leave of absence experience, when someone’s on a leave, well, parental leave specifically, maybe medical or other types of leave a little bit less so, but you have a lot of time to reevaluate. what’s going on in your life. And if you don’t feel valued where you are currently, people move around, people shuffle. Versus actually taking care of them, making them feel like the company’s doing the best they can, that they are being supported while they’re out there, much more likely to return. And if you wanted to make, if you want to turn this into a business case, the cost of bringing someone back from leave, that’s what’s opposed to replacing them at maybe one point, however much X their salary to find someone new, very clear.
Sarah Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it was really great to have you, Emily. Thank you. I know you have, you shared so much good information and we will include the benchmarking report which has such great information as far as what others are doing and as you’re building policies, especially if you’re looking at new types of leave that aren’t yet included at your company. I think that will be really helpful. So thank you for joining. Thanks for sharing all of your great information, Emily.
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