From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

HR Brew

Kristen Parisi

hr-brew.com

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Benefits guide text on pamphlet next to cup of coffee

Benefits

An illustration of reporter Courtney Vinopal's headshot.

Courtney Vinopal

As many companies head into open enrollment season, the gap between employer offerings and employee understanding is widening, according to recent data from insurance company MetLife.

Fifty-seven percent of full-time employees 

 said they “fully understand what their benefits cover.” That’s the lowest level since the company began tracking this issue in 2020; at that time, 66% of respondents said they had a full understanding of what their benefits do and do not cover.

A few factors may be at play here, according to Todd Katz, head of US group benefits with MetLife. Benefits are becoming more expensive and complex, and as a result, plan design may be changing. Employers are grappling with 

 that mandate they provide benefits like paid leave to workers in certain jurisdictions.

At the same time, employees are feeling more disengaged and less connected to their work compared to previous years, the survey found. As a result, employees may struggle to understand their benefits, as well as “access those benefits the way that they were intended to be used at the time of need,” Katz said.

To address this disconnect, MetLife is encouraging employers to double down on personalizing the benefits experience for workers, as well as adopt an “always-on” communication strategy.

The concept of offering workers enrollment tools to help them make better decisions about their benefits is likely familiar to many total rewards leaders. Companies like MetLife have doubled down on such solutions in recent years, 

Such platforms typically rely in part on employees’ medical and financial data (provided they elect to share it) to deliver “curated recommendations” for workers, Katz said. Allowing “employees to add personalization at every touch point where they possibly can” may help them feel confident in their decisions without having to study up on the entirety of their employer’s benefits offerings, he suggested.

Once employees elect benefits, HR teams can think about how to communicate with workers throughout the year to ensure they’re actually using them, Katz said.

“Whatever way you’re communicating to your employees, you’re nudging them to use the benefits the way they’re supposed to be used,” he said. Ideally, the process of using the benefit should be easy, even if it’s administratively complex on the back-end—as may be the case with paid leave, for example.

An effective benefits communication strategy should be “proactive and year-round,” Tim O’Connor, VP of HR technology partnerships & enrollment services with Prudential Group Insurance, told HR Brew via email.

HR teams should consider how communication styles and access to technology may differ across their employee populations. Ideally, he said, they’ll communicate about benefits across multiple channels, and ask workers how they’re doing throughout the year. He added, “HR leaders should regularly revisit not just 

, then measure effectiveness and ask for employee feedback.”

Communication isn’t one-size-fits all. 

Overloading employees with benefits information is certainly possible, a separate survey from Alight Solutions, a benefits technology platform, suggests.

That survey found 46% of workers were overwhelmed by the amount of communication they received about pay, benefits, and well-being. This was particularly true for respondents in HR (67%) and senior management (69%), but not individual contributors (25%). This suggests that while decision-makers who are steeped in this information might not see the need for additional communication about benefits, lower-level employees are “actually craving a little bit more,” said Laine Thomas Conway, Alight’s VP for delivery, enablement, and engagement.

Ensuring that employees fully understand their benefits, then, may require leadership to consider how their needs may differ from rank-and-file workers, she said.

MetLife, Prudential stress year-round communication on benefits

The share of employees that fully understand their benefits has dropped, according to one survey, likely due to factors like cost and complexity. 

Benefits industry leaders stress personalization and always-on communication ahead of open enrollment 

Parentaly, a platform that helps companies and employees navigate leaves of absence, recently announced it’s appointing an advisory board to help businesses better navigate challenges surrounding this benefit.

The board, which includes former CHROs and chief people officers from companies including Mastercard, Xerox, and MetLife, is coming together at a time when more employers are expanding their paid leave policies—either due to local laws, shifting expectations among workers, or both.

But even as businesses roll out more generous paid family and medical leave policies, they’re not always thinking about how to manage the challenges that arise when employees take advantage of these benefits, Allison Whalen, Parentaly’s CEO and co-founder, told HR Brew.

“When people are going to step away from work for the longest period they will ever step away, we need to make sure that there are systems within the organization set up so that that doesn’t backfire, meaning the work continues effectively,” and workers feel supported in their careers when they return, she said.

Some of the top challenges Whalen sees employers experience when workers take a leave of absence is team burnout, as well as business disruption. “When you remove a person, what happens to the priorities and the business deliverables?” she said. While companies typically have business continuity plans for events like natural disasters or data breaches, “they don’t think about business continuity plans when it comes to parental leaves, which are very frequent and predictable,” she added.

The CHRO board will tackle these types of issues through thought leadership and research, as well as advise Parentaly about its product, Whalen said.

Just over one-quarter (27%) of private-sector workers had access to paid family leave as of March 2023, up 17 percentage points from 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. More recent figures from SHRM show 39% of employers offered paid parental leave as of this year. As employers have rolled out more generous leave policies, HR teams have developed different strategies for handling 

These concerns are becoming more pertinent to the C-suite as larger shares of employees (including 

) gain access to leave, and workers become parents later in life, Whalen noted. “There are just more people leaving, and it’s becoming more problematic, and so that then becomes escalated to a more senior level.”

Leave benefits present an interesting challenge for organizations from a risk-management perspective, Tiffany Stevenson, former SVP and chief people officer at WeightWatchers, who is joining the board, told us. She said she hopes the board can explore how to “bring other decision-makers into this conversation, specifically the CFO, COO, and CEO.” Such C-suite leaders may help organizations think about their “operational effectiveness, the long term talent strategy, and direct impact on business continuity” amid leaves of absence, she said.

Illustration of a person with two children looking at a calendar, with hand holding money in background.

Former CHROs join board to advise businesses on parental leave

Former HR leaders from Mastercard, WeightWatchers, and others will help advise companies on navigating challenges that arise when workers take time off.

Parentaly taps CHRO board to advise organizations on leave-related business concerns

Democratic lawmakers reintroduced a bill on Sept. 16 that would provide up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave to US workers.

The bill, known as Family and Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act, was first introduced by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Rep. Rosa DeLauro in 2013, but never gained enough traction to see passage, regardless of the parties controlling Congress.

 comes at a time when mothers of young children are leaving the workforce at the highest level in four decades, according to a 

 from the University of Kansas of federal data. Guaranteeing paid leave to workers who need time off for a major life event could end the “devastating choices” Americans face “between their livelihood and the health of themselves or their families,” Sen. Gillibrand said 

Though the bill is unlikely to be passed in the current Republican-majority Congress, state-level paid family and medical leave programs have 

 some employers to enhance their benefits.

Most US workers would be eligible to take paid leave under this latest version of the bill, which would grant benefits on a sliding scale basis. This means a minimum-wage worker would see 85% of their average monthly earnings replaced, while those earning the median weekly US wage would receive 67% of their earnings while on leave.

Unlike previous versions of the legislation, the 2025 bill would create a dedicated trust fund to pay out benefits, rather than funding the program through payroll contributions.

Workers would be eligible to take leave for reasons covered by the 

, including caring for a new child following its birth, adoption, or placement from a foster agency, as well as caring for a serious health condition for oneself or a loved one.

The authors of the bill take an expansive view of caregiving, as workers would be able to take leave to care for a child of any age, a step-parent, a parent-in-law, and “any other individual who is related by blood or affinity whose association is the equivalent of a family relationship.” This latest bill also includes a provision that would cover “safe leave” for workers experiencing events such as domestic violence or sexual assault.

More than a dozen states now have their own paid family and medical leave programs in place, creating complexities for HR teams overseeing benefits for workers across multiple jurisdictions.

Enacting a federal program “would certainly make things a lot easier” for these employers, Ashley Brightwell, a partner in the labor and employment practice of Atlanta-based law firm Alston + Bird, told HR Brew. It’s unlikely the FAMILY Act will move past the introduction stage this time around, though, as it lacks support from Republicans who control both chambers of Congress.

In the meantime, “you’re going to see more and more states start filling in those gaps,” Brightwell predicted.

A number of employers, including Levi Strauss & Co., Patagonia, and Etsy, 

 to members of Congress in support of the FAMILY Act. In a 

, Levi Strauss & Co.’s chief human resources officer, Bernard Bedon, spoke to the link between paid leave and productivity.

“We have seen firsthand that providing access to paid leave is critical for supporting healthy and successful employees and their families, which in turn allows them to perform better at work,” he said of the company, which provides 20 weeks of paid leave to workers who give birth to a new child.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand speaks at a 2021 event outside the US CApitol.

Democratic lawmakers reintroduce paid family leave legislation

Though the bill is unlikely to be passed in the current Congress, state-level paid family and medical leave programs have already spurred some employers to enhance their benefits. 

Lawmakers push for paid family leave, again, with Levi’s and Patagonia on board

Adam DeRose

Leave management software platform Tilt announced Tuesday a shift in thinking when it comes to managing leaves of absence with its new leave experience management platform, powered by AI.

The move introduces an entirely new category of HR tech: leave experience management, according to the startup, reimagining the approach companies take to administering and managing leaves of absence with more transparency and hands-on control by companies and their HR teams.

“The problem isn’t that HR doesn’t want to be involved in leave at all. The problem is they’ve never had the right tools to be involved in the right way,” said CEO Jen Henderson, who founded Tilt in 2017. “The long held belief was that you had to outsource the entire function, but the real job to be done was to eliminate the administrative burden like complex math, the endless forms, the broken data streams. No one ever wanted to be fully removed from the human connection.”

Leave can be an important strategic and cultural asset for companies when it comes to retention, Henderson added during a demo at the HR Technology conference this week in Las Vegas, NV.

Handling requests, processing, and administering leaves of absence often requires a complicated, multistep, and multi-stakeholder operation that involves a lot of personal information on the part of the employee, and compliance expertise on the part of the employer (or vendor), and lots and lots of paperwork.

Tilt last month completed a $15 million Series B funding round, led by Bramalea Partners, with participation from HearstLab, Firework Ventures, Origin Ventures, and Techstars, bringing its total funding to $37 million.

Henderson said Tilt emerged to better serve businesses looking to do right by employees in the very space “where work and life, quite literally, collide.”

“The most critical, vulnerable moments in an employee’s journey should be handled by the people who know them, who know the names of their family members, know the names of their children, not by a stranger,” she added.

Leave of absence, Henderson suggested, is often outsourced to mitigate compliance risk and maintain efficiency on the complicated processes . However, when employees need to use leave to address something in their personal lives, navigating the “black box” of a vendor’s processes can impact an organization’s employee experience, and doesn’t always free HR teams from headaches.

“This broken model erodes the very culture that you’ve worked so hard to build,” Henderson said. “It pushes your best talent towards the door and leaves you legally exposed with no direct control over the process you’re ultimately liable for.”

Tilt’s new LXM platform leveraged “intelligent automation” to create a workflow and dashboard that serves both the HR pro and the employee. AI is allowing humans back into the leave of absence process, Henderson contends, because the technology can help with the administrative, accounting, and compliance burdens, while providing employees, managers and HR teams with the necessary information about the employee leave in one central platform, managed by HR.

“AI could finally sever the link between administrative complexity and human empathy. It could automate the tedious work to finally liberate the humans that are involved in leave,” Henderson said. “You should be in control of supporting your employees’ critical life moments as HR.”

"Out of office" written on a heart-shaped note posted on a calendar. Credit: Francis Scialabba

Introducing a new HR tech category: Leave experience management

This leave management platform is betting that AI can help HR take back the reigns of leave management.

Speakers

Questions?

Many companies pour resources into benefits programs, only to see dismal engagement rates that waste budget and leave employees underserved. This session unpacks why traditional benefits miss the mark and shares proven strategies to dramatically boost utilization when it matters most.

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Why Employees Aren’t Using What You’re Offering (And How to Fix It)

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Sword Health

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Love it or hate it, everyone in HR has an opinion on unlimited paid time off.

Just 7% of US companies offer unlimited PTO, the Wall Street Journal 

. And 30% of private employers that don’t, instead offer their employees an average of 10–14 PTO days a year after one year on the job, according to 

 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employees with unlimited PTO take an average of 16 days off annually, a 2024 SHRM 

, while those afforded a specific number of days take an average of 14.

Some HR pros have said that unlimited PTO policies can be 

, which can lead to over and underutilization of the benefit. The latter can lead to higher rates of 

That was the case at Bolt. Its CEO, Ryan Breslow, 

 in July that the fintech company “killed unlimited PTO” because “it’s totally broken.”

“We looked at the data really on how often people were taking time off internally,” Kelly Lawson Pihl, Bolt’s head of people operations, told HR Brew. “[It] skewed towards higher performers were not taking enough time off, and others maybe took a little bit more advantage of that ambiguity.”

Bolt’s unlimited PTO policy dates back to its founding in 2014 and was the norm for its remote workforce of about 130 full-time employees in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa until July. Its new policy grants all global employees a specific amount of PTO annually. Bolt’s roughly 80 US-based employees, for example, get 20 PTO days. (PTO taken prior to the policy change will not be counted toward the 20 days this year, Lawson Pihl said.)

Lawson Pihl said she wanted to address the “high discrepancy” between employees taking too much and too little time off. Under the unlimited policy, she said some employees, especially high performers, were taking as little as one or two days off per year, while others were taking more than 20 days.

“There’s too much confusion on how to utilize this unlimited policy. I think it sounds really progressive and good on paper, but in practice, again, it created this imbalance, created this discrepancy, and then confusion,” she said.

In switching to a traditional PTO policy, Lawson Pihl said she hopes more employees will feel empowered to take time to relax and recharge, especially high-performing employees, who may be more prone to burnout.

“To provide that clarity really gave people the ability to say, ‘Okay, I have this. I know it’s expected, and I know that I should be taking this off,’” she said. “‘In fact, my team, my managers, leaders, people ops, really expects it. It’s not just ambiguous and there.’”

Different countries have different cultural expectations when it comes to time off, Lawson Pihl said. US employees, for example, 

 time off than their counterparts in other Western countries. People leaders can help encourage them to take more time by setting a standard for the “sacredness” of days off, she said.

“[Make] sure that managers discuss with their team a clear point of contact when that person is off, to not ‘at’ them or ping them in Slack messages, if at all possible, and to do schedule sends for when they’re back on,” she said. “Those day-to-day tactical things that managers and team members can do to help make this more of an actual time that people can unplug.”

HR leaders reevaluating their PTO policy should solicit employee feedback on what is and isn’t working so they can make a data-driven decision, Lawson Pihl advised.

“Figure out the problem that you’re trying to solve first and then work backwards from there,” she said. “Give folks the resources and tools to be able to understand and utilize fully whatever policy you go with.”

illustration of post it that reads out of office

Why fintech company Bolt eliminated its unlimited time off policy

The goal was to close the gap between employees over and underutilizing the benefit, Kelly Lawson Pihl, Bolt’s head of people operations, tells HR Brew.