DMEC: Welcome to Absence Management Perspectives: A DMEC Podcast. The Disability Management Employer Coalition or DMEC as we're known by most people provides focused education, knowledge and networking opportunities for absence and disability management professionals. DMEC has become a leading voice in the industry and represents more than 20,000 professionals from organizations of all sizes across the United States and in Canada.

This podcast series focuses on industry perspectives and delves into issues that affect DMEC members and the community as a whole. We're thrilled to have you with us and hope you'll Visit us at www.dmec.org to get a full picture of what we have to offer. From webinars and publications to conferences, certifications, and much more. Let's get started and meet the people behind the processes.

Heather Grimshaw: Hi, we're glad you're with us. I'm Heather Grimshaw with dmec and today we're talking about paid company leave benefits and how you introduce and pay for them. Our guest is Tina Camputzzi, Senior Digital Product Manager with Symmetra Life Insurance Company, who writes about developing a business case for paid company leave in @Work magazine. We'll include a link to the article in the Notes section of this episode and have asked Tina to shed light on how disability and abscess management professionals gain buy in for this increasingly valuable benefit and what the biggest sticking points are. So Tina, your recent article lists several challenges to introducing this type of benefit, which is, as you note, increasingly popular, and we're hoping you will talk with us about those challenges and how employers overcome them.

Tina Computzzi: Sure, Heather, and thank you so much to you and the DMEC for having me here today to talk about this. I would say the biggest challenge that I've seen employers face around offering a company paid leave benefit is really threading that needle between a program that is beneficial to employees while still being cost effective for the business.

This includes understanding what is most important to your employee population, meaning what types of benefits would your employee population benefit from? So, for example, if a manufacturing company with the majority of its employees being of the blue-collar male Gen X demographic, there's likely not going to be much excitement over providing a company paid parental leave benefits.

You really have to know your employee population and demographic to be able to find what types of programs will be beneficial for them and will resonate with your employees. This is where I feel like talking to your employees really makes a difference. So in the article I do reference that conducting employee surveys and or focus groups are really a great way to engage employees to get feedback on maybe what they find lacking in the overall benefits package, but also run new ideas by them and get buy in to see what really resonates with them.

Heather Grimshaw: That's such a good point and I would assume it might be something that some employers don't think of intuitively or when they're building their packages. So thank you for sharing that. So is it leave management professionals who are proposing paid leave to executives? In your article you mentioned human resources professionals and benefit team leaders and I was hoping that you would provide some nuance or specificity there.

Tina Computzzi: Typically what we see is that it's HR and or benefits leaders are really kind of championing the need for providing this type of benefit to employees and are typically also the ones that are presenting the final business case to executive leadership, mainly just because of the hierarchy of how most companies work. This could also include leave management professionals, but since company paid leaves are a portion of an employee total benefits package and budget, that's why it's usually part of the broader conversations around benefit offerings and not just related to the specific leave of absence piece of a benefits package. I will say though, in that same breath, the lead management professionals within a company are the folks who really see the need for this type of benefit are sort of in the trenches with employees understanding what types of lead people are going out for and the struggles that those folks are having. So a lot of times the lead management professionals are the ones who are starting these conversations about providing these types of paid company leave benefits if it's not already on your company's radar. So really being the ones championing the beginning of looking at providing these types of benefits since they are the ones that are in the weeds with employees and really going through the struggles with them.

Heather Grimshaw: Thank you. Yeah, that's helpful and I appreciate the way you said that part of the broader conversation. So in this article you outline several of the analyses that should be included in a proposal for paid leave benefits, including budgetary financial cost and cost benefits, which teams would collaborate to provide these types of analyses.

Tina Computzzi: So it's really crucial, Heather, to have the correct internal and external parties involved in helping develop a paid company leave business case, budget analysis and really implementing this kind of a program to make sure that it is successful.

The key players that should be participating in this type of work go across the traditional typical company right in all the different facets and areas. In addition to, you know, what we just talked about, which is hr benefits, leadership, lead management professionals, there are some other key roles that should definitely be included throughout the process.

This really is dependent on a company's makeup. Some companies have all of these kinds of roles, others don't. So it really is specific to what, what your company does. But I would say the first one that is not required, but having the assistance of someone in a finance department, so a financial analyst or similar role from the company to really help build out that budget analysis is certainly helpful for folks in HR benefits or the lead management professionals.

If you have available resources within your company, they really understand all the different pieces and facets of what not only executive leadership is looking at or looking for from a cost perspective but can bring in other perspectives from across the company as well that maybe you don't have access to. So in addition to finance, you also want to include whoever is administering your leave of absence. So whether you outsource your leave administration to a third party vendor or administer leave of absence in house, including the party who will end up administering the paid company leave in the discussion and plan design review is really essential and making sure that you're including them early in these conversations as well. If you are using a vendor for leave administration, they can likely provide best practice recommendations on plan designs as well as provide their timeline for implementing the paid company leave. Some leave administrators do have certain guidelines or guardrails on what they can and can't administer. So you want to make sure that you're working with them diligently to make sure that you're not sort of building this plan design in a silo that an employer or your leave administrator maybe can't actually administer for you. And then maybe you're stuck going back and trying to reconfigure the plan design. And then in some cases you have to redo your budgetary analysis or you might have to just end up administering it yourself, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a leave administrator. I would say including your employee benefits broker in the conversation is also really important. But so benefits brokers usually can provide insights into what they see their other clients doing in regards to paid company leave. They can also work with the disability and or leave carrier that you have to gather relevant claims data to help support your business case. And sometimes they can even offer their own resources to assist with developing a business case and financial analysis. So it doesn't ever hurt to ask all of these questions of your benefits broker. And they can be a really great, a really great lifeline to helping you through this kind of work. Really kind of the main, the main people that are involved also is that executive leadership team that has to actually sign off and you have to gain buy in from right. So it'll vary company by company, but in most cases a business case and financial analysis must be presented to executive leadership to approve a paid company leave since it is part of the budget. It's allocating money from the budget to pay for employees leave. So we most of the time see a CFO type role being the main decision maker in something like this. But since these folks are heavy on numbers, typically all the more reason to have that compelling budget analysis prepared when having these conversations with executive leadership.

Heather Grimshaw: So there are several references in your article to the strategic value and financial viability of paid leave and I'm hoping that you'll give us a few examples of how organizations you've worked with have quantified this.

Tina Computzzi: Yes, I love this question. It can definitely be hard to quantify the positives of a paid leave program for executives, but that really doesn't mean that it's impossible without having a business case outlining the full cost analysis. I have seen many executives just see the dollars going out the door to pay for a program like this and not understand that there are positive impacts to the business that come from providing programs like this. So showing that return on investment really is key, not only as part of your business case, but ongoing after the program is implemented, really keeping up in keeping track of those types of things and presenting them out.

This is why it's really also important to understand your executive leadership's priorities before and during creating the business case. So what is most important to them and what will resonate will help you all the more with with getting something like this approved. So is it return on investment due to the company's budget constraints? Is it retaining and attracting talent because your company is having trouble recruiting and keeping talent? Is it company culture and values that is most important?

You really want to just understand who it is that you're presenting to and those decision makers motives behind what they want to see so that you can build that compelling business case in the right way. So one example is I worked with an employer that was in the blue collar space where they had to pay a lot of overtime for folks taking unpaid FMLA time. So they had to have various folks covering because of this unpaid leave for various reasons and a lot of times it was unplanned. So you would expect that when offering a paid leave program, something like this would only exacerbate this issue where you have folks you know still taking time off unplanned and having others have to, you know, use Overtime to, to keep the business running. But we were able to quantify that by building the company leave plan design in a way where this time has to be planned and taken, you know, within a certain amount of time and planned out for certain reasons. They were actually able to reduce the amount of unplanned leave and replace it with planned leave. So supervisors within the company could better plan for absences and move folks around to cover manufacturing lines without needing to pay as much overtime. I also have seen in white collar companies that I've worked with, you know, it's really focused more on the retention and reputation of the company. You've seen, I'm sure, all of the best places to work nominations for companies.There's, you know, a bunch of different ones out there, like best place to work for women, mothers, fathers, caregivers. So I have seen in the white collar industry space, it's more about brand recognition and retaining and attracting talent.

So in the, in the white collar space, it sort of just has become table stakes to provide these types of programs. And you see plenty of folks in the white-collar space that they won't even entertain employees won't even entertain working for a company that, that doesn't offer these types of programs. Especially when you're looking at, you know, younger millennials or Gen Z where they're looking to start families, they are in that sandwich generation. They just know the need and the value for providing these types of benefits because their current employer or past employers have provided these types of things.

Heather Grimshaw: I really appreciate those examples, both in terms of that operational cost savings as well as the ability, as you noted, the, the brand and that reputational piece for that white collar environment. And it reminds me of something that you said earlier on, which is that broader brush approach to that paid leave, that ability to support your employees when they need it.

So this leads me into my next question here, which is the competitive advantage paid leave offers to employers? In other words, how does paid leave help employers recruit and retain employees?

This is something that you've touched on a little bit throughout our conversation. And I'm thinking that an example would be powerful here to bring it down from that theoretical view to the practical piece.

Tina Computzzi: Definitely. And more and more, paid leave is becoming table stakes in every industry. With the United States being one of only six countries in the world without any form of a national paid leave program, the onus really is falling on employers to provide this type of benefit.

And to compound the the issue, the desire for these types of benefits is also being fed more and more by states adopting paid family medical leave programs. So we have certain states that are going forward and providing more and more of these benefits, but it's still leaving out employees in states that don't have that type of benefit. So in multistate employers, you really see where there can be a difference, a vast difference in what's provided to employees. And it really has become the employer's role to sort of create a even playing field for employees for time that they can get off across the company. What I have definitely seen again, and I kind of touched on this in the last question, but is in the white-collar world, there definitely is a push for this. Like in technology and in any other kind of a white collar area, you really see employers needing to provide this type of a benefit. And it's not even a question in a lot of cases, especially paid parental leave. So I have worked with several companies and I would say this is right around the beginning of COVID and before COVID you saw not as much of a push for companies to provide benefits like this. It was pretty common still. But I think Covid really helped put these types of programs on the map and realize that with folks working remotely just need to have that time off to reset for whatever the reason may be.

I think that with COVID there definitely has been that push to provide these benefits holistically. So for the white collar companies in general, specifically in technology, I'll say we'll use that example.

Without providing these types of benefits, you, you can't hire the type of talent that, that you want to see. If you ever look at what I referenced before, those like best places to work, it is a lot of tech forward white collar companies that are kind of winning these awards and you hear of these large, you know, companies publicly traded that are offering massive amounts of, of paid leave, you know, 100%, six months, you know, things that most companies can't actually provide. You know, these, these very generous paid benefit offerings. But employees aren't even looking for, for things that are that generous. Right. I think it's just providing some sort of benefit that, that provides people with the time off that they need and meets employees in the middle of what do they get from an unpaid perspective and really helping them bridge the gap in their time of need to take leave for whatever the reason may be. You know, typically it's care of a family member or a paid parental leave. Those are the two most common ones where if an employer doesn't offer that in today's day and age, you're going to have a very tough time retaining or attracting talent in that sandwich generation, the, you know, younger millennial generation as well as Gen Z, where folks are just starting to think about families, they have parents that are aging. It's definitely a need to attract that new talent and that top talent.

Heather Grimshaw: That's really helpful context to hear that an organization was able to reduce that unplanned leave and also better plan, which helps the people who are continuing to keep the business running as well as those people who are out on leave. And it does lead me into my last question for you today, which is whether most employers acknowledge how paid leave helps them as well as the their employees. And I'm wondering if it's common knowledge among employers, if you think it's getting more common. And I'd also love to hear in your opinion, what is driving this trend toward, as you said, the sort of that approach of table stakes. You really need this in your benefit suite in order to recruit, retain, and also improve that employee morale.

Tina Computzzi: Yeah, definitely. And I think that rarely do employers pull away benefits like this. Right. I have not in my time seen a employer who has offered a company paid leave and then completely taken it away.

I've definitely seen it where it has been tweaked, which is definitely something that employers should do. You're not always going to get it right the first time. No matter who how much you plan, you know, budget can change, your employee demographics could change, the needs of the business could change.

So always making sure that you are going back and reviewing and looking at how the plan is doing after implementation is very, very crucial. I would say that employers are beginning to acknowledge how the paid leave that they are providing help them, even though, like I said, rarely are employers pulling away these types of benefits.

But looking back and acknowledging what's happening in the program, the satisfaction of employees in benchmarking that and measuring that from before you provided this program to after you provide this program and continuing to get that feedback from employees around through either surveys or through focus groups, and finding different ways that you can potentially tweak the program to make sure that you keep that balance of is this meeting employees needs, but also is it helping the business? Right. So all the things that you're doing as part of that initial business case around what is this going to cost, what are we going to see from turnover, retention, hiring that new talent, all of that.

Those things should continue after the program is implemented and continue to review them and, and make sure that the program is working in a positive way. But many Employers are seeing a huge benefit from this just in the many different things that we've talked about today.

So whether it is being nominated in these best places to work things overall, brand recognition, being able to cut down other costs such as reducing the need for coverage and overtime, as well as just this very simple piece of employee satisfaction, right?

Employees being happy to be at work. A happy employee is a productive employee in most cases. So employees are going to be much more likely to feel a tie to the organization if they have needed to use this type of a benefit and they feel supported by their employer.

To your second question around, is this common among employers? I'd say it's becoming increasingly more common. So while employers are not kind of taking away these benefits, I don't think in the past there were as many companies looking at how a program is doing as there is today.

Right before we just like oh, we're going to offer this and here we go and it's just there, right? Whereas now with different financial constraints, different asks from executive leadership really going in every year and looking at the total benefits package and planning for the next year is becoming much more crucial for those HR benefits and leave professionals in order to make sure that these benefits continue to stay for for the long term within the company and they're not something that is cut. So needing to continually revive that business case and look at this is becoming more increasingly common.

Heather Grimshaw: I appreciate that reference to ongoing review of the data and the benchmarking piece which I think is incredibly valuable, especially to folks who are so hard pressed and strapped for time. It's a great reminder. Thank you for that and for your time today. Please check out the notes section of this episode for the link to Tina's article in @Work magazine.