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 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 with Brian E. Bass, CLMS, DMEC's CEO, about why employers are investing in different types of supportive employee leaves.

So Brian, we have seen an expanded menu of employer sponsored support for employees,

including paid leaves as well as caregiving leaves, menopause leave, and others. Would you talk a little bit about how this landscape has changed during the last five years and what challenges that creates for employers?

Bryon E. Bass, CLMS: Sure. Over the past five years we've really seen a fundamental shift in how employers approach leave policies. Traditionally, leave was primarily focused on medical conditions or parental leave, but today's workforce expects more holistic life-stage-based benefits.

There's some key drivers that are behind this shift. First, let's talk about demographics and workforce expectations. You know, we're learning more and more in a variety of surveys regarding the workplace that Millennials and Gen Z workers are increasingly expecting flexibility, work life balance and personalized benefits more than previous generations. We also had COVID 19 impact us in the last five years and the pandemic really amplified caregiving challenges, mental health needs, and the demand for more comprehensive leave policies.

And let's not forget we are always in a legislative change environment within this space and more states and local governments are expanding paid family and medical leave laws and that puts pressure on employers to offer competitive benefits.

And finally, when we take a step back and look at mental health and wellbeing awareness, I think there's a lot of emphasis and information out there on how burnout, stress and work life integration challenges are accelerating, accelerating the need for new and different types of leaves. And so those are some of the key drivers behind the shift that we're seeing in offering new and differing types of leave options for employees.

Heather Grimshaw: Those are such great points. And there are so many changes as you're, as you're noting there, which must be incredibly stressful for employers to not only anticipate but be able to respond to in time to be supportive.

Bryon E. Bass, CLMS: Absolutely. And you know, that's one of the reasons that DMEC is here. We want to provide our members and community at large with the resources that they need in order to be successful in understanding and navigating through all of these challenges and changes as they occur.

So if you're not a member of dmec, we encourage you to become one so that you can also benefit from what we provide in terms of updates on these legislative changes and best practices that we see companies employing in their benefits portfolios overall.

Heather Grimshaw: That's a great point. And we'll include a link to the legislative and paid sick leave updates in our Notes section of this episode for listeners as well. One of the most dramatic changes we've seen is with bereavement leave, as you outlined in a recent DMEC trends article, which we will also include a link to in the Notes section. And it would be really helpful to get some insights from, from you into what employers are grappling with and what they're doing when it comes to changing their bereavement policies.

Bryon E. Bass, CLMS: Yeah, well, there's really a significant number of challenges that are there, but if I were to boil them down to what I believe are the top three in having conversations with our employer members, the first would be around balancing employee needs with business operations. I think it's important to recognize that companies must ensure coverage while allowing employees to take the necessary time off. And one of the challenges that some employer members have shared with me with respect to this concept is with the increasing number of leave benefits that are being offered not only from a statutory perspective,

but also by employers in what I refer to as the war for talent, they're finding that there are so many options and there is some probably unfounded fear for the most part, around how much time are employees going to be taking off from work and how is that going to impact productivity and what do we need to do from a staffing perspective? And it's interesting when we look at the data itself in terms of leave usage, it doesn't really increase much, if at all. In fact, if you look at time off as on the whole, employees may have been using time off from their paid time off, buckets of vacation or sick time to take time off for things that weren't covered under A formal leave program. And now that a formal leave program may be available to them, they're taking it off and they're coding it, if you will, and stating the reason for why they're taking it.

So there really is a shift in how the benefits are being used, not necessarily an increase per se in overall usage. I think it's important for business to take a step back and recognize that.

But we also should be monitoring that data as well and to ensure that things are working as we anticipate and expect them to do. Because you can always have an impact in one area or another based on changes that you're making. And if you're not watching those things, it's very easy for them to go off the rails, so to speak. The other is one that we just talked about as it relates to legislation. Right. So we're continuing to navigate a patchwork of laws. There are different jurisdictions that have different requirements. And so we know that the multi-state employer has difficulty remaining compliant, if you will, with all of these different laws.

And so increasingly they're looking for resources and tools that can help them understand what the compliance requirements are and how they might relate to their employee base. And then secondarily, when you think about the policies or these new leave types that might be being introduced, sometimes there are some jurisdictions where that's allowed.

So you need to coordinate and ensure that you're running those concurrently where it makes sense. And that generally that coordination of benefit or determining what needs to run concurrently is difficult for employers that don't have tools or software that can help them with those challenges. And then most importantly, I think is around stigma and utilization. And I just talked about utilization in terms of employers believing that, you know, it's going to increase the amount of absence on the whole. But let's think about stigma and utilization from the employee's perspective. Even when these policies exist, we still see employees may not use them because they fear they may be judged as a result of that or by taking the time off they feel there are career repercussions.

There are several organizations out there that are really highlighting this as it relates to mothers in the work environment and how it's impacted their careers and how employers need to do something differently to ensure that those impacts are not actually occurring.

And so I think that's an area that we can all rally around and we can keep our eye on so that we can ensure that we're not creating a stigma associated with taking leave that's being offered by organizations. You know, an example I'll give is one company that I worked for. We expanded our mental health leave, but employees hesitate because they were worried that it would be perceived negatively. And I think that's really where culture plays a key role. You know, policies alone aren't enough, but companies have to figure out how you normalize the use and make it okay to use that.

Heather Grimshaw: It's such a good point. Policies aren't enough. And I really appreciate the reference to stigma and utilization, which is something that talks to culture. And so segueing into the next question that really kind of broadens our perspectives here, some industry experts believe combining leaves into a broader category category may be helpful to employees who need supportive leaves, yet worry about asking for a specific type of leave. As you've just noted, stigma can play an important role in terms of employee use of leaves. For example, during a recent DMEC webinar, we learned about Visa's experience introducing menopause related leave and that employees haven't yet used it. Though it sounds like a really innovative and generous program. Can you talk a little bit about how employers can encourage more use of leave and why it's in their best interests to do so?

Bryon E. Bass, CLMS: I think it's important for us to understand that if we were to go back to what I said when we first started this conversation, and that is employees, generally speaking, are looking at benefits based on life stages. So you can think that maybe a younger worker who is coming into the work environment is thinking about expanding or starting a family.

Their benefit needs are going to be different than someone who is in the later stage in life and they already have had a family or decided that they didn't want to start a family overall and they have different needs associated with perhaps their own condition. Or they might need to be a caregiver for an older parent or even older children or anyone else, any other family member in their life. So understanding that we all have different life stages that we go through, and even within those life stages, there are different needs that individuals require. And we need to look at things from the inclusivity lens. And I know that, you know, DEI is getting a bad name out there recently, but that doesn't mean that we should stop looking at things on how we can ensure that we're providing fair and equitable opportunities for everyone and understanding and embracing that we are different and that individuals who have different needs also need those needs to be met.

So how do we do that and why is it important? It's important from a business perspective because the reason you provide benefits to your employees to begin with is to ensure that they have a foundation and a platform, if you will, upon which they have support financially from a job protection perspective, to take a leave as they need it or use a benefit. Even medical benefits are an example of a benefit that's provided. But also there's an expectation that in order to attract and retain the best of the bunch, you need to be able to provide benefits that are inclusive across that spectrum. And so that is why it is really so important.

Heather Grimshaw: It's a great term to use there or phrase the best of the bunch. And I think one of the things that I've heard you say a couple of times is maybe an assumption or a fear that certain types of leaves might encourage certain behavior or would have a cost with productivity.

And your use of the data that shows differently is really helpful. I would think that that ability to connect a direct line between a benefit or that type paid leave and whether it's better productivity and ability to do things more effectively would be increasingly important in an environment, in a business environment, where, let's face it, you have to make ends meet and show that ROI.

Bryon E. Bass, CLMS: Absolutely. And that's increasingly important. I think that to drill down, if you will, a little bit more around the stigma of taking leave and what I call the unused leave dilemma, is that steer and that fear of judgment. And then workplace culture, you take those three things together and these are barriers for employees to taking the leave. And that's because they worry that taking that leave will make them look weak or unreliable. And we don't want to look weak or unreliable. But at the same time, we have needs that need to be met. And so employees need to feel that their employer understands that and respects that and will give them an adequate amount of time to take care of the life's events, as I explained earlier, as they arise. The other thing to understand, and this is one thing that I found was pretty pervasive in my experience, and that is the lack of awareness and clarity at the employee level about knowing that these benefits even exist. And even if they do exist, and they know that they exist, they may not really understand how they access them. And so it's important that employers, if you have a benefit package, you've put these types of new and emerging leave benefits, made them available to your employee, but what do you do to actually promote those and share those with the employee and explain to them how the benefits work and how they can access them and how they use them? Why would you have the benefits to begin with if you didn't Intend for them to be used. Right. That's the question. And that's usually one of the difficult things for me and others in this space to understand is like, why are you providing this benefits? Again, let's take a step back and understand the purpose for it. And it goes back again to finding the best in the bunch and keeping the best in the bunch like we just talked about. And then one thing that we're starting to see emerging, and we did some research with Aflac and Prudential last year in terms of the workers that are left behind, if you will, in the work environment when individuals take leave. And so this becomes a concern about workload issue. Employees who take leave might feel guilty or feel that, you know, their work won't get covered if they step away. So when they come back, they've got to catch up on the three or four weeks of work that piled up because no one was set up in such a way to be able to support the work that that individual was doing or needed to, needed to do while they were out on leave. That is one area that I think we don't put enough focus on and we have an opportunity to take a step back. And when an individual needs this leave. And some of these leaves that we're talking about are definitely not foreseeable. You know, they're not things that are like, we know they're happening a week or two in advance or even more in terms of pregnancy or parental leave, but there still should be some type of a process in a way to identify a way to cover the work while employees are taking these types of leave because you don't want to discourage them from taking leave or even shortening the amount of leave that they're taking because they feel so obligated to get back to work. And so on the employer side, one of the other things that we need to really be focused on is setting the right tone. If managers don't model taking a leave, employees won't feel safe doing so. And the way that we set that tone is by normalizing conversations about leave. Instead of making your leave policies buried in the HR documents, integrate them into your wellness programs and your manager training and companywide communications. My experience is that many employers don't highlight or promote the HR resources or benefit resources that are available to their employee. And I think we could do a better job of that overall.

And so take a step back and identify where and when would it be appropriate to highlight the leave options and the other benefits that are available to employees and then using that broader category of leave kind of touched upon this a little bit. But instead of creating types of leaves that employees feel hesitant to request, for example, the menopause leave, some companies are introducing what they call wellbeing leave or life event leave that gives them more flexibility without forcing them to disclose specifics.

We also seen that with caregiving leave, right? Caregiving is a broader term than just, you know, taking leave to care for your daughter or your son or your parent or your spouse.

This gives employees that flexibility again, so that without having to disclose, like, really the underlying reason for which they're taking that leave. You talked about visa, and, you know, when they introduced their. Their menopause leave, the employees didn't use it. And that's because the employees were uncomfortable asking for something that felt too specific. And they felt that, you know, fear of judgment kept them from using a benefit that was meant to support them. And I think that's a really, really good example of why it's important to think about what you're calling things, how you're grouping leaves and categories, and how that might impact or might introduce stigma unintentionally in the benefits package.

Heather Grimshaw: Yeah. It is such a convoluted topic in so many ways, because it is wonderful to see employers moving forward to provide different types of leave that truly support employees at, as you mentioned earlier, different life stages, and then recognizing that sometimes, as you also said, the policy isn't enough and so really potentially reconsidering how the information is conveyed, how it's repeated, and then how people are encouraged really, to move in and use some of the different benefits that are offered. So that's really helpful. And then this leads me into my next question, which is really how offering these types of quote unquote, supportive leaves reflects an employer's culture and whether it influences recruitment and retention, as you mentioned earlier, that best of the bunch type concept.

Bryon E. Bass, CLMS: Yeah. So there is a significant amount of evidence and data out there in the research that indicates employees who feel seen, understood, cared for in their environment are likely to stay and not only stay at that employer, but to be even more productive. I think all of us can agree that when we fill those things, we probably give a little bit more than we would if we didn't feel like we were. We were being recognized as more than just a number or someone who's sitting in a chair doing the job. And it's important that we demonstrate that and we show that to individuals and we jump. And we don't just have a promotion of, oh, we've got all these benefits that are available to you, but then we have a culture that discourages the use of them. That is completely counterintuitive. And I don't really understand that, but it happens. And you know, as a result, you know, I've been talking about this new term, care washing, and what's happening here is that companies are, like I said, they're promoting these generous leave benefits for their branding and PR purposes,

but they fail to create a culture where employees feel safe using them. And that's not all companies are doing this, but there are companies that are definitely promoting it, but then they're not creating that culture. And then employees at that point will quickly recognize that their benefits are more performative versus meaningful. And it's just like, oh, we're providing these benefits because it's a good PR moment for us to say that we're expanding our parental leave benefits to cover 12 weeks instead of four weeks or whatever it was before,

or meeting the new standard that other employers in our sector are also providing. But really behind the curtain, we are discouraging people in a passive way from using them. And so some other subtle discouragements around use are associated with the workload expectations.

When you have negative manager reactions or a lack of transparency, all that breeds distrust and disengagement. Right? And one of the things that we continue to see from a compliance perspective, if you will, in the environment is for those statutory lease for which employees have an affirmative right to use and take, if they so qualify, is that negative manager reaction is generally the one thing that is mentioned in almost every single lawsuit you see filed when an employee feels that they were retaliated against for taking FMLA leave, or for pregnancy leave or any other type of statutorily required leave.

There's some type of instance of that negative manager reaction. And even sometimes the exact words that that manager may have used in their conversation with employees that was inappropriate and discouraged them or chilled them, as the law calls it, from taking the leave.

The same thing can happen on the non statutory benefits, which is kind of what we're talking about here. We were talking about an expansion of leaves that are not necessarily statutorily required, but employers are offering them nonetheless. If you're offering them as a benefit and your managers are not supporting those benefits being used, then you're going to see that distrustment and disengagement. And that's really what care washing is all about from a definition perspective. And, you know, again, training managers to support and not penalize leave requests is very important. I know managers have to be trained on a lot of things. They have to go through a lot of training courses year in and year out. I think even as individual contributors, we go through a lot of different training courses, whether it's related to harassment, things of that nature. But it's important that we find a way to train managers on these types of benefits as well. And we also need to ensure that you're tracking and analyzing your leave utilization. And if you see a benefit isn't being used, ask why. Ask yourself why Visa did that. Right. They didn't see anyone using the menopause lead, so they had to take a step back and understand, well, why? Why aren't they using it? Well, they determined that it was too specific and that provided stigma for employees to actually use it and take it. And most importantly is getting employee feedback through surveys or focus groups and other mechanisms. You really want to understand what's valued to your employees and those things that are valued, do they feel comfortable in utilizing them or taking advantage of what's being offered to them?

Heather Grimshaw: Absolutely. I'm thrilled that you mentioned the important role of the supervisor manager, because it is always somewhat startling to hear some of the examples, true case examples of what can happen during the regular course of employment.

So to wrap us up here, we have heard more about employers starting to acknowledge the mutual benefits, pun intended there, the mutual benefits to offering more generous and inclusive benefit packages. I'm hoping that you'll share some insights about that business case to providing those inclusive approaches to disability and absence management that recognize and honor all employees during different life stages.

Bryon E. Bass, CLMS: Retention and engagement is an area that the best employers are focused on. You know, we spend a lot of time recruiting employees and finding, like I said, the best of the bunch. And once we find the best of the bunch, we want to retain them and we want to ensure that they're engaged. Employees who feel supported through their major life events are more likely to stay. That's plain and simple. Again, we've seen that in the research in the data. So we know that retention and engagement is a big part of roi. And depending on the industry that you're in, you can spend several thousands of dollars in training expense bringing your employees up to speed to be successful in their role.

And depending on exactly what they're doing, that number could easily get up into hundreds of thousands of dollars that are being spent to train individuals. So there's a direct correlation right there between retention and engagement and how employees who are supported with these additional type of major life event benefits are more likely to stay, that means you're going to have less recruitment costs to recruit those that are leaving and also less overall training costs on that initial training and getting people up to speed. So that's one area from an ROI perspective. Productivity and mental health is another area. You know, when employees are able to take leave when needed, they're less likely to experience burnout.

And burnout is something that seems to be on the increase. There's a significant amount of increased anxiety. Generally speaking, we're seeing increased levels of just mental health challenges in general. And we have been seeing them even before the pandemic started. But you know, during the pandemic it really increased exponentially. And we're, we're still seeing that in some of the data and the, the diagnostic reasons why individuals might be needing to take time off or under short term or long-term disability conditions.

So it's important for us to recognize that with individuals who might be struggling from a mental health challenge, if they're not getting the support that they need in order to deal with those challenges and even overcome those challenges, then they're going to be less productive at the end of the day.

And in many facts, you might lose them. That retention and engagement plays a key part in how we're supporting individuals in their times of need, needs and this competitive differentiation, you know, I talked about the best in the bunch that's really about attracting top talent.

Business is looking for the best of the best and they really want to ensure that they're able to attract that. And providing competitive benefits, including competitive leave benefits, will provide a competitive differentiation for many businesses and in some cases may bring you to an even playing field, if you will, with any particular industry to provide what others are providing. And some might just go a step above that and provide a little bit more so that they can attract some talent. And then overall, I just think in terms of, you know, employers and what they should be thinking about to prioritize and rethinking their leave policies. If there's just one thing, you know, I say ensure your policies are actually usable again, the employees that don't feel comfortable using it, to them it's just words on the paper.

I mean, I shouldn't say to them it really is just words on the paper. We got the whole care washing situation I just described and you know, normalizing that usage from the top down and flexibility, that one size fits all approach just doesn't work anymore. And frankly, it's never worked. We just, I think are more recognized now in terms of, we all come from a. A different background. We all have different perspectives. We all have different needs.

We all have different family situations. And so therefore, that flexibility is even more important. And I think if you think about inclusivity and flexibility, sometimes those things can mean the same thing. Right. And we need to embrace that and ensure that we're looking to be fair, equitable, and inclusive. And the policies that we're providing to employees so that no one feels left out or left behind.

Heather Grimshaw: Those are all great points, and I love how you pulled it all full circle. So thank you so much for your time today.

Bryon E. Bass, CLMS: Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it.