Relieving the Pain in Leaves Administration with Special Guest Dave Polacheck

[00:00:07] I'm Pete Tiliakis and as always, I'm joined by the legendary Julie Fernandez. Welcome Julie. Thanks Pete. Yeah, and you brought company. I did bring company, where did you bring it? And it's not somebody unfamiliar to our podcast. Yes, yes. We've welcomed Dave Polacheck back to the show.

[00:00:25] Welcome Dave. We're excited to have him here. He's a veteran of the show. And yeah, we're going to be talking some new research and some leave pain points, which is my favorite. My favorite subject here. Yeah, HR amp, Payroll 2.0. So welcome Dave. Thank you. Yeah, interesting topic.

[00:00:40] I'm going to talk with you guys. Yeah, good to have you, man. It's a we were opining before this, before Julie jumped on. Wish we'd recorded it. So hopefully we'll be able to bring some of that into this. And always good to have you guys on.

[00:00:51] Underneath you've got some new research that maybe some of our listeners might have even participated in. I'm excited to share that. That's right. And thank you if you did. What's interesting about this leave topic is that actually it was born out of a payroll.

[00:01:03] Survey that we did a little while back maybe the end of 2021 early 2022.

[00:01:10] And one of the findings in that payroll survey, which was a lot more extensive than the ones we're doing now was the number one pain point like the single number one pain point for payroll was leaves an absence and I mean rocking it.

[00:01:25] It was 60% of folks said that it was twice as much like two X what anyone else you know was calling out as a pain point.

[00:01:32] Including you know the whole host of really crazy things that payroll deals with unions are variable pay and like just a lot of really complicated stuff and yet. Leaves and absence were were clearly front runners in the pain area.

[00:01:47] Oh yeah, this is historical I mean I would have said the same thing as a payroll leader and I would have said it was the same.

[00:01:53] I never let me actually rephrase it to I would have said that as a payroll leader and then every fortune whatever number you want to put on it.

[00:02:01] Organizations that I ever worked with from a transformation perspective there was never one that said we're really good at leaves leaves and not a problem.

[00:02:09] It always was in scope and it was always how can you help us with leaves now a lot of times it fell out of scope because there wasn't a lot of.

[00:02:15] Great resources for fact them but the point is is this is historically been a pain the ass for a lot of organizations.

[00:02:24] That's right that's right and actually you know as a result the things that are the biggest pain in the ass out there areas where advisors get involved in help yourself problems.

[00:02:33] And so I thought it would be a real cool combination to share not only some of the snippets from our leave pain points survey findings but then interweave stories from the trenches right.

[00:02:44] As you know like we work with practitioners and solving practitioner issues regularly and and we've had a whole lineup of leave clients and Dave's led many of those and so.

[00:02:54] We thought that would be a great combination to show some of the research to talk about some of the research and then and then have day bring some of it to life through some of the client engagement that are happening out there.

[00:03:04] Yeah agreed yeah and I would just point out that I think you know a lot of this you know payroll comes at this largely from a compliance and a policy sort of perspective.

[00:03:13] But this has so much I believe and and have seen so much implications on the employee experience.

[00:03:19] And and their families in some cases too, so this is this to me is a really critical part of the employee journey that you got to get right any experience really is never very good so. That's great.

[00:03:31] I think also there's opportunities to improve it right now so every leave team we talk to is kind of sheepish about it about how painful this process is and we're like guys you're in great company.

[00:03:40] Yeah nobody feels great about their leave process but but it is such an intimate process where you're involving potentially an employee's family members. If those are the folks you're communicating with during the process and everything and getting it right.

[00:03:53] You know obviously really matters at a moment that matters to use kind of the design thinking language for it.

[00:03:59] Yeah you know the other layer in this to I always forget or just sort of thought of is you know when it comes to leaves often it's not one of those things were like payroll where you could look at it and say okay.

[00:04:09] We can probably harmonize a lot of a lot of what's going on here from a payroll perspective sometimes with leaves you can't do that especially if you have CBAs or you've acquired companies or you've grandfathered certain things.

[00:04:20] I find that the rules tend to be kind of all over the road so it's often hard for for HR to really get their arms around some sort of a standard process if you will.

[00:04:31] Yeah yeah well so here's what's interesting so we've been doing this mini surveys instead of you know any kind of full blown heavy lift lately and that means before asking you know 10 15 questions you know trying to keep it targeted and.

[00:04:46] And this one on leaf pain points selfishly what we really wanted to know was wow that's an interesting finding that's two X more you know painful than anything else why is that or what makes it more painful and.

[00:04:59] You can brainstorm a whole list of things you've already started right there's compliance that's like whack them all and just keeps coming.

[00:05:06] There's technology there's there's all these different factors and so we started the survey with a whole host of factors that we typically hear are contributing to making leaves and absences so painful.

[00:05:20] And to me the first finding was you know maybe coming to it if I'm not sure whether what it is what I expected.

[00:05:27] A very frequent answer was technology making it painful but in aggregate across the categories far and away the single most the single biggest source of pain were process area and.

[00:05:44] And and people of course there were elements of people in coordination and all the hand off some things that have to happen people have to be in the know and how to make that happen.

[00:05:52] But but I'm not sure when you think about the you know the landscape and the fact that folks are inclined to go solve with technology or drive to automation.

[00:06:03] That the process piece doesn't get left out a little bit right and David that that would be a great place to start you know it is first which are seeing some of these engagements and the extent to which you know people process and technology are all intermingle in what the clients are trying to solve.

[00:06:21] Yeah absolutely well I think the challenge that we have is that when we think about process we think about something that's linear you know it's a workflow it has an initiation point and an endpoint.

[00:06:32] And you work your way through and as we're peat and I were talking about before we started recording is the idea that we normally design these processes for how they're supposed to work step by step assuming one path from beginning to end.

[00:06:44] And then afterwards we go through and say where the places where it might go wrong where we might need to make a correction or fix history or whatever. And then we account for that in permissioning certain users to go back and fix history.

[00:06:56] This linear process mindset just doesn't work for leaves because it is a normal part of a leave that somebody goes out on what we think is going to be a workers company and that takes it down to very specific paths with path with specific compliance requirements and then all of a sudden it flips midway through.

[00:07:12] And it's some other kind of leave or for another person it's really how they're planning to exit the organization they just didn't tell us so they figure out how to orchestrate a leave and it ends up being an exit and so just the variability in what happens during the process.

[00:07:26] Coordinating with medical providers all this stuff makes it such a challenge and and so technology definitely. Yeah can play a role in improving it. I think we'll probably get into a handful of different technology topics.

[00:07:38] Both from a positive standpoint and in some cases we've seen from a negative standpoint over engineering.

[00:07:44] On the positive side we're seeing some great new providers out there, Pete and I were talking about how some of the providers offering technology for leave management today have really just flipped their back office products as a as a TPA or a carrier.

[00:07:58] Well, maybe there's an opportunity for us to sell licensing to our back office software to clients and we'll build some kind of an experience layer that will be light for their employees and call it a product.

[00:08:09] And that shows right it looks like a back office product there's a handful of new ones out there.

[00:08:14] And so, in some absence of others where they're really designing for the end user experience whether that's for your leave team for your managers for your business partners or your employees.

[00:08:24] And so technology is now like coming up and I think there's going to be some interesting stuff there. I'll say one of the thing about is is just the idea of over engineering.

[00:08:32] I've talked to a couple of clients recently. I'm thinking about one in particular where they're using the technology to manage the status in the timekeeping system whether or not I can log time and the specific categories of time like for an intermittent FMLA that I can log time to.

[00:08:50] And yet because the process is not linear there's constant corrections that need to be made and if the frequency of those updates to the timekeeping system.

[00:08:58] Aren't keeping up then an employee does show up to work and yet the timekeeping codes they need aren't available or they don't even have access.

[00:09:05] So this is kind of an over engineering that we see for such a non-linear process and I think it's something we're encouraging some of our clients to dial back from actually. It also means everybody has to be have a heightened level of expertise, right?

[00:09:20] To even know what to choose and pick in the area. And it's such a specialized area with the compliance changing all the time that that's another risk for sure when you see that.

[00:09:30] Yeah absolutely guiding employees as they initiate their leave or maybe it's their manager, HR business partner making sure that whatever initiates the leave is.

[00:09:41] Is really designed for the knowledge and understanding of the person that's going to be doing it. And if that's a frontline employee, I'm thinking about a retail client where you know just the expertise, the education level their frontline employees.

[00:09:53] They're not going to be able to interpret a lot of you know big compliance words they just need a basic process map that says, you know, are you sick in what way are you sick or what's going on and asking more simple questions.

[00:10:06] So how it gets initiated I feel like is as big part of it. Yeah, it's technologies been I mean we've talked about this before Julie technologies been a bit of a gap for this process as well.

[00:10:17] It's not that the HR, yes, couldn't hand or the HCM now couldn't have handled the transactions they do perfectly. It's connecting all the stuff that has to happen today's point all the variables that go on outside that are non HR related.

[00:10:31] But trigger and and our part of the experience that orchestration between all that is what's missing and that's where I think employees get frustrated with and the handoffs and the.

[00:10:41] And the HR gets frustrated too, right? And it's hard to create a good experience when you can't have all those systems and processes and things working together. Yeah, it's there's such an interwoven ecosystem as well that really involves the carriers as Dave mentioned.

[00:10:56] Yeah, you know, providing these services have some of those systems and ideally intertwined them with services, you know, so that a employer can just say, yeah, okay, not me, you just handle this for me.

[00:11:08] But that's not everybody's place and as shared services are growing in different activities are coming into the folds of shared services. Everything about this solution and how you're going to deliver the services gets intertwined with, you know, who's doing what and how much is the carrier doing.

[00:11:25] Am I just looking for a technology to help my internal folks deliver leaves or am I looking for a third party administrator that is processing the leave itself and also, you know, and also doing some of that administration at feeding it back.

[00:11:40] Yeah, yeah, but even just little things like facilities being engaged for equipment returns or building access or other things around the experience right even beyond the carriers and the external third parties that might need the data.

[00:11:54] And internally sometimes those pieces and parts aren't aren't maneuvering together they're happening by a poll or some sort of a manual interaction, so that's where I think balls get dropped and communications break down as well. And that experience gets crappy for the employee.

[00:12:11] Yeah, we had some interesting findings in that area, specifically around the process and the orders of different areas of different parts of that non-linear journey that Dave is describing. And I think what's really crazy about that and what are the findings that we had showed.

[00:12:27] Or that there's a lot of focus on the specialized knowledge teams that need to be involved that sort of third party, you know, your carrier or your third party administrator who's doing that your specialized leave teams. But that's not all the story right?

[00:12:42] And so when we were looking at our survey, we had considerations for the payroll team and for the IT team and for the local business partner and the manager and even automation or bots and and in effect you, you know, almost a third of the activities in processing, you know, can fall into those other categories of folks.

[00:13:03] And so it's very hard to craft, you know, and to end delivery model if your laser focused on the two thirds that are really the experts in the pros and the space and the rest of its, you know, and the rest of it is feeling some pains because it hasn't been architected to the same degree.

[00:13:21] Yeah, yeah, and I think that's where this is where tech I think is going to get there to help right because again, if that orchestration is missing, that's where.

[00:13:29] You know, AI and technology and integrations are going to be able to to lend that and surface insights to those folks to make them experts right make everyone an expert to be able to get these things done for it correctly.

[00:13:39] Dave you were working recently with kind of unwinding or rather, you know, like specifically looking at the delivery model that a client had in this space and like any any observations or things along that journey that that stood out at you.

[00:13:55] Or were new findings for them about the operating model and who's involved and how that should all function together.

[00:14:02] Yeah, well I think like a lot of organizations in our studies showed us this to you know thinking about the large percentage of the work that's happening outside of the traditional leaf teams are their third parties.

[00:14:15] Each of our business partners are spending a ton of time on this and. Putting in technology that provides employees direct visibility sort of transparency or where they're at the process.

[00:14:27] Can defer a whole lot of calls and contacts here each of our business partners in your shared service center around just what's the status of my leave so that's definitely.

[00:14:35] A big area. I think one of the challenges around this is as you think about building a business case saving each of our business partner time is a goal that everybody can stack hands on and yet is hard to.

[00:14:50] I want to find in a way that'll actually hit the bottom line right there's a lot of we see lots of funding requests that say there's productivity savings here and we quantify that to be.

[00:14:59] Ex number of millions of dollars and yet when you say how will we know we achieved that or not well it's kind of softer savings and so I think that's.

[00:15:09] But certainly the technology that provides direct visibility to employees about the status of their leave that allows them or even their medical providers to facts directly into the system,

[00:15:20] the documentation that may otherwise take you know by the time they send it by the time a person processes it on the other end a couple of weeks or we.

[00:15:28] You know this stuff that makes a process more efficient and transparent for them I know eliminates a lot of that kind of field level effort. Yeah. I feel like sometimes the challenge that way,

[00:15:40] major challenge in that space is just getting the right level of visibility to the right party, right? And that's a that's partly a technology thing. Sometimes it's a roles in an organizational hierarchy thing because that's what technology is is reading in order to figure that out.

[00:15:57] And there's an element of a sensitive nature of the information that I think becomes a limitation to folks feeling like they can really hit a home run in that area. Whether it's a case management or tool that, you know, that they need to share

[00:16:16] the details with with a carrier of the third party or, you know, how does the business partner who's further removed from some of that sticky detail actually get visibility without getting too much getting things that shouldn't really get their hands on?

[00:16:31] Yeah. And I think that's where the design for purpose, technologies, make a real difference. If you're using particularly if you're using like a service now, implementation that was primarily for IT as a case management tool or even as for

[00:16:43] if it's for your HR shared services or GPS and maybe it has some of the right security partitioning you need when you're pulling on all the medical stuff. And again, the non-linear idea that like these systems that are designed for linear workflows don't necessarily work well for this.

[00:17:00] So I think this is where the the fit for purpose technology makes a huge different as it's been different difference as well as the compliance piece, right? Regulations. I mean, we're all seeing at the regulatory environment is constantly evolving state by state. In some

[00:17:13] cases, municipalities or counties, it's a lot to keep track of. And so being able to rely on a tech provider that is either doing their own research or partnered with Hitler or somebody else

[00:17:25] to make sure they stay up to date makes a huge difference. And we've seen that actually, we were looking at a couple of different technologies. One being service now which of course is this

[00:17:37] amazing tool with a lot of great functionality. It's a shell in which you can build any process you want. But it doesn't have deep leave management, compliance stuff built in. You have to be the expert

[00:17:50] to build it in. Whereas other platforms, it's more built in. We're talking to a pulp stream which is another kind of process or workflow oriented tool that's not specific to leave management. But

[00:18:02] they've done a deep dive to make sure that they have all the compliance baked into the tool and are partnering with experts that keep them up to date. So there's different models to look at.

[00:18:13] I guess in part of the question for buyers or for leave management leaders is, can I rely on me and my team to stay up to date and make sure that our platform stays compliant?

[00:18:25] Or do I need a partner who can bring compliance to me and bring those updates to us? So I think there's you know, that's another decision point or decision criteria we see for those in the buying

[00:18:37] in the buying place. Yeah, so that the niche tools that are taking an employee experience route that definitely cool to look at because they're actually solving from that lens. Historically, I think what we've seen are some of these tools come out of the carriers themselves

[00:18:55] and there's been a challenge if you've lived in that world to have usually, I think in our survey, we ask how many carriers are involved in the different leave programs that you have. And on average,

[00:19:09] most folks were in the two to three carriers across their SDDL to the, you know, all the different programs that they had workers comp. And so when you have two to three up to five plus

[00:19:19] carriers we don't must 10% of folks had five or more carriers in this space, and each one might have its own solution for case management and tracking and interacting with you, but anyone doesn't solve or give you visibility across an employee who, as you said, is going to

[00:19:37] wander and take a path from workers' comp to SDD, to LCD. And their situation is going to move them from one bucket to another or a couple of buckets simultaneously sometimes, right?

[00:19:49] And so figuring out how to create that experience in that insight on the back end so that you can even your leave team can see it, much less your, your HR business partners who really want to know

[00:20:01] what's going on. Julie, do you think there's, do you think just in terms of the robustness of the data that comes out of the leave process and all the adjacencies? Do you see that customers

[00:20:13] want to get into that data? I mean obviously it's great for compliance and other things but any sort of, I don't say strategic but maybe workforce planning type activities that can do

[00:20:22] off of this data? Well certainly and Dave might take it up on first crack. Yeah, Dave you may, yeah that may be a Dave question right? Yeah, no what have you seen I guess is better way to say it.

[00:20:33] Yeah well I think first of all just to start with compliance we're working with the client right now we're compliant their compliance savings is going to be the business case to buy this technology.

[00:20:41] Yeah so I mean absolutely you want to be one step ahead of the class action attorneys and not let them be the first ones analyzing your data through all of your employees that are coming

[00:20:51] complaining to the right. Right? So you want to stay ahead of that but I think the word where there's some really interesting data to be looked for is if you can track your processes in a way

[00:21:03] that lets you do kind of a roll through put analysis where you're saying where are the steps of the process where either there's fallout or due to our own administrative lag we're losing a day here,

[00:21:14] a week there and overall we say on average our leaves are taking us five days of administrative added on to the medical causes for the leave. If you have the data to do that kind of analysis

[00:21:28] then you have the business case for your improvements. Exactly, we're actually working with that same client who were compliance is probably going to be the name of the game for getting their funding. The other piece of it is looking step by step through their process and seeing where

[00:21:44] are we losing time because we're not keeping up or because you know we let the follow-up to get medical provider information lag by a couple of days does that end up being two more days

[00:21:56] added to the whole leave. That kind of data is really hard to capture if you're tracking this on spreadsheets or if you're just looking at workday status changes you really need the process

[00:22:08] level down data to do that and so that's not I think that's key to this. This to me tells P, we had a number of guests that you know the the over writing messages been you're not alone right

[00:22:20] so you started this episode by saying like if it's if it's ugly if maybe is ugly you know and it's just a complicated process like that's you're not alone and I think even the level of

[00:22:31] data you know we work with clients that have you know leave programs they're you know they're doing a lot with their leave programs but because of the way that they're knit together they can't

[00:22:42] tell you what their leave volume you know you can't with any certainty say exactly what your leave volumes are with the overlap or in any you know with any great certainty or with any great

[00:22:53] ease can you get simple information much less the really complex information that leaf teams really want to be able to do a good job managing that leaves and return to works yeah yeah absolutely

[00:23:05] there's a piece of this too which is we encourage our clients to get into a little bit the research projects of what is the cost of an employee being a day away for a day because if we can

[00:23:18] shave a day on average of our leaves or two days or five days to be able to quantify the actual business impact of that which is a hard research project to do if we're able to come up with some

[00:23:31] numbers around that we can apply that to a lot of other HR initiatives we want to do you're talking about changing attendance programs you're talking about getting people onboarded quicker

[00:23:42] right that knowing what is the cost to your business of having a job left open which is the same as having an employee out on leave for an extra day right it's a hard research project to do it's

[00:23:53] company specific and in some cases it's role specific you know if if a person in the council payable let's say is out for next for three days and their teammates just pick up the volume there's really

[00:24:03] not a lot of impact they're unless it's being covered out overtime so it's a hard research project to do but we see that it can become the business case for a lot of things beyond leew and so to the

[00:24:15] extent you can partner with your finance and operation folks to at least get some kind of directional data around the cost of absences there's a lot you can justify or you know a lot of business

[00:24:26] case you can build out of that for leave management and other areas of HR yeah agreed agreed you know well we're talking about data I did promise to highlight some findings from the study

[00:24:37] that we had as usual there's so much to talk about that we're kind of all over the map but in the data area we did kind of ask a few questions about the types of data or the things that folks had

[00:24:50] that would be complicating the leave process we already talked about a number of carriers and there's usually you know two to three all the way up to five and more we asked

[00:24:59] respondents about the number of leave types that they track in the core HR system and that to me was interesting because some folks will take the approach that you know your core HR system is really

[00:25:14] just tracking honor off a leave active and active maybe you know pay leave or non-pay leave but really you know minimizing the degree to which you're trying to categorize those leaves in

[00:25:25] a core HR system of record and leave it to your carriers or to your TPAs versus doing it natively and kind of the right answer the two thirds of folks that responded in the survey had 10 or fewer

[00:25:39] leave types in the core HR system and so I thought that was interesting right because it doesn't mean you're taking a minimalist approach to leave status and reason types that are in aligned with your payrolls and letting some of that compliance have a lifting differentiation with the unions

[00:25:55] you know really work itself out in the specialty systems with the expertise that really understands them right right I just ask you guys maybe a side thing because I don't study this deeply obviously is there anybody out there doing anything really exceptional or differentiated right now when it

[00:26:12] comes to tech or AI around leave that you know update well I'll tell you the one really interesting use case we've been just talking with the pulp stream about and this is not something that's

[00:26:25] even been prototype yet but it's an early idea we're brainstorming with them which is and this is on we haven't really talked about the return to work process and ADA accommodations and the interactiveness that's to get somebody back to work which is where a lot of the

[00:26:40] compliance or legal risk comes into play is the consistency with which your managers you know the same manager with the same situation says yes I can accommodate or no I can accommodate or across your organization where different managers making different calls based on the same

[00:26:58] you know like duty restrictions princess is the idea of can we use technology to look at the history of the types of accommodations we've been asked to make and whether we've been able to grant

[00:27:11] them roll by roll and really getting into the details of it's a gripping restriction it's a standing or sitting restriction it's you know it's a frequent break so whatever it is whatever restrictions are can we analyze that data and provide a recommendation to the manager for the

[00:27:31] interactive process that they would have an app to agree or disagree with and get better consistency through AI yeah and I think there's a real case that this could be done especially if you start out

[00:27:44] perhaps instead with just instead of just looking at the history of what you would accommodate it also work with occupational therapists is a lot of companies do to write up the physical requirements

[00:27:55] of your more standard roles so that it's an easier question to answer can we accommodate this well if the restriction ties directly to a particular aspect of how we've described the job then

[00:28:08] it's clear yes we can no we can't so can we mash all this data together and instead of just throwing it to a manager out in the field saying can you accommodate this or not we're also

[00:28:21] giving them a recommendation and how much of the risk can we mitigate with that that's a really interesting space I think that we've not seen executed in technology yet but but as we talk

[00:28:31] to clients about the possibility of it it's pretty exciting and and I think very doable actually yeah you know we actually see that coming from multiple dimensions too because there are parts of

[00:28:41] that and making that happen that tie to having job descriptions that identify what some of those items might be right that ultimately need accommodation for and so I see this also you know

[00:28:56] being talked about quite a bit in compensation and some of the compensation tools that are aiming to to get into AI yeah yeah you know Julie we've talked a little bit about this about I talked

[00:29:08] a bit about earlier about the orchestration of this and and I'm wondering if if it's some point we're going to get to and maybe somebody already has it and by the way if you if you're building

[00:29:15] something differentiated and leaves get in touch we'd like to we'd like to have a briefing and check it out I study you know deeper on the HCM side and see what they're doing with HR processes and

[00:29:26] I think what what you're seeing is that this like for example we talked about UKG building their connected agents and off of large action models where it's weaving together use cases across multiple modules to bring together a single experience for the employee that you make

[00:29:42] sure they're hitting all the pieces based on the personalization and contextualization of what they're asking to me this is a perfect opportunity for leaves you almost need employees and even maybe even HR and business leaders almost need somewhat like a leaves contriert right that is doing

[00:29:59] all that orchestration and surfacing insights and helping you make good decisions so hopefully with all the virtual agents and other things we have out there we're bringing that together for employees but I'd love to make a call to action here and say if you're building something cool

[00:30:11] and leaves let us see it. Julie and I would love a briefing so let's check it out tell the world about it. I think integration is another topic that comes up quite a bit and it's another

[00:30:22] area where there are you know multitude of flavors and a lot of it doesn't depend on your leaf your leaf solution right you you have employee data from your HR system that's needed you

[00:30:35] have payroll that has to be in the loop you have time data for eligibility determinations you have one or more you know carrier opportunities and all these guys have to pass data you know

[00:30:47] they may be the same system in certain cases or different systems you know that have to work and so data has to jump through many hoops and we'd ask in our survey you know exactly how old

[00:30:59] is the hours data in particular by the time it gets to you know whatever the mechanism is that's doing the eligibility determination and you know the overwhelming answer was that you know the data

[00:31:13] is oftentimes up to a week old or more than a week old and and that impacts some things especially when you're trying to figure out how you met days where days worked requirements and you know

[00:31:25] are you going to be eligible for this activity do you estimate what else could have happened in that week or do you have to wait and delay the process or how exactly do you make a process more

[00:31:35] efficient when the data itself is taking so long to to make its way through the network or the ecosystem of data that you have set up oh yeah I mean everything I describe would would rely

[00:31:47] almost not entirely but heavily on integrations right ended democratization of data being passed around so yeah and I guess the way that that conversation first starts you know I'll just pick on a work day because that it's still say maybe 60% or more folks in the orange market anyways

[00:32:03] are using the update is a work day you know user or workday company will come to us and say okay I have worked day that's my strategic solution but but leaves is messy so how do I you know like how

[00:32:17] to what what switches do I flip to make that go better and and in fact you don't know one one client may have worked day only for HR when may have a for HR in payroll when they have time

[00:32:28] and workday you know sometimes the data is going through workday to a carrier and sometimes it's it's going directly to a carrier and so just even the the variations and the number of different permutations of the way data is moving around and these ecosystems is is confounding

[00:32:47] yeah very different for every for every client we work with well you I think your report had what three and a half to four or so systems per administration so that's a lot right

[00:32:57] that's a lot when you're bouncing around all that you've got to have an aggression you mean if not get away from having so many systems so you know Julie something that jumped out of me on

[00:33:04] this and I think it's it's obviously I mean I think it's a very obvious thing but I saw you had something around half I think it was less than half of the organizations perceived their

[00:33:14] organization to culturally prioritize leaves and it seems like every one of these these complicated processes that are often left un- cared for, uninvested in are the ones that that the firm

[00:33:27] struggles with the most and I and I almost would say like payroll and maybe some others it's almost like the more complex it is the more the more it gets neglected right it's like oh it's not my problem

[00:33:37] yeah to me that was a really fun one in fact it might have made for a good closer but let's talk about it now right because here leave leave folks that are in the trenches with leave saying yes

[00:33:47] leave us a this is a priority for my firm to you know to bring people back to work and to follow the talent and to you know make sure that we're doing everything to enable keeping and using

[00:33:58] the talent and yet respecting their needs and you have many other leave practitioners I will say my company doesn't care like we just want to be compliant and we're talking about the roles

[00:34:08] and people are probably halfway out the door anyways by the time they're going on a big leave and the culture in the organization has such an impact and what I think is actually driving

[00:34:19] a lot more initiatives around leave today is the impact that COVID had on everyone universally who in some way shape or form stopped work or had work stopped and everything he vanned to figure

[00:34:31] out what do we do to stop the work and how do we start the work again? How do we get people into the office or have them virtual and there was like a very generic accommodation right issue

[00:34:42] that the whole world had to deal with and it did bring this whole idea of needing to take a leave or be out for a while and then having to figure out how to come back

[00:34:54] a much more widely talked about things. Yeah well let's be fair in the United States we've done a horrible job I think of of caring for workers when it comes to leave particularly women right I mean you know with caregivers and just different situations I think culturally we've

[00:35:12] done a bad job as a society deprioratizing people taking time off of work unlike other countries that do prioritize it so we've got some work to do there just legally I think to make

[00:35:23] it make it a bit more accommodating to workers. Yeah there's there's I'm amazed at the differences we see as you're talking to the leave teams those who and maybe it partly is a factor of industry and volume and turnover but in some cases you've got folks that

[00:35:41] are see this as this purely administrative process a little bit of cat and mouse game of you know we're trying to catch employees who are clearly just trying to find a way to slack off

[00:35:51] and certainly there's there's a valid narrative there I mean you can go on TikTok and get any that and figure out how to get any diagnosis you want right but thank for sharing that Dave.

[00:36:06] So by the way I need to take a leave purely I forget to tell you yeah by the way I have I have an obscure disease you know but the flip side of it is we talked to some folks

[00:36:15] who are so deeply caring who are available to make themselves available to their employees or their managers on all powers to answer random questions and whatnot who really like they're they see their purpose as being taking good care of these employees helping them get healthy again

[00:36:31] helping them get back to work and I think there's something about a talent strategy in that is you're thinking about what you're trying to accomplish culturally and making sure your staff with folks that have a bit of a caring mindset because it makes a big difference

[00:36:46] and it makes a difference in how your process will go not just in the tone of communication between your team and your employees. Yeah that empathy is a key part of servant leadership right I think more organizations are coming around through realization they've got to be more about

[00:37:01] removing obstacles and helping employees be their best versus necessarily you know coaching them out the door or sort of speak so yeah. So I think in one week our way shape or form we've kind of

[00:37:12] trips to cross all of the different things that we touched on in the survey except maybe one of Dave's favorite which is what about measuring outcomes or you know what are you finding

[00:37:23] that folks are most we talked a little bit about business business cases because you have to fund what you want to do in some way shape or form but we did get some suggestions and it was all

[00:37:33] look at the map on how would you define success in this space what sorts of things have you seen in the field Dave that might intersect with you know just the feedback that we got on measuring

[00:37:43] outcomes and figuring out success. Well I think I think as we've talked about the Holy Grail is reducing time away and being able to quantify the value of reducing time away and so the mechanism

[00:37:57] there you know as we talked about there's kind of doing the role through but you're yield or just a more to kind of subject a process view to see can we reduce administrative time or in tightening

[00:38:08] up our communication with medical providers can we get people back and back sooner if we have more of a case management or medical case management approach can we get people back sooner so so certainly

[00:38:18] reducing time away is probably the biggest but also most delusive you know kind of value driver here definitely compliance is a huge piece of it I mean if you it only takes a couple of big

[00:38:33] settlements or class action suits or one to pay for a lot of improvements whether that's increasing your staffing by technology going to a TPA to you know to to rain in your spending as it relates to

[00:38:48] to leave management the other levers levers are impacts that we see is reducing the the transactional cost of over and under payments and then specifically uncollected you know premiums and other things that basically you're you're you're not collecting all employees out

[00:39:07] there's definitely a big impact there I'm trying to think what else you know another one that I was thinking about as you were talking was you know your leave empath who you just described is definitely

[00:39:17] thinking about you know customer satisfaction or you know the decrease in time for a decision those those sorts of things that you can maybe measure with an NPS or you know really getting into

[00:39:29] them please voice at the employee and how they're experiencing it yeah I mean when you think about it's just subjectively if if I've been through one of the hardest moments of my life and the company

[00:39:40] showed just the right amount of compassion and made sure I was taken care of until I was ready to come back to work that the impact on employee experience my loyalty to the company is so much greater

[00:39:52] than if that same kind of care was taken when I wasn't in that vulnerable moment and so those companies and I'm not seeing specific data on this but those companies that really put the effort to

[00:40:01] take care of folks while they're out that empathy component I would imagine and again I we don't have data for this but we'll see an impact on retention and it's it would be an easy

[00:40:13] study to do would be to say for those employees are those employees that go out on a leave and have a positive experience and then come back is their great along Jevody there yeah I

[00:40:23] being a city that is well yeah oh maybe another micro survey that's our next one yeah you know speaking of that you know Pete I think we don't want to wrap up before saying you know we're doing these some regularity and we're just completing and if finished

[00:40:40] it's starting to talk about one in the AI for HR space that'd be cool to do another time and coming up our next one will be tapping into some insights around compensation

[00:40:53] where there's a lot of things happening and so as you can tell like we do like a little 10 or 15 question thing and it just gets us talking about all sorts of things yeah these are great I

[00:41:04] think the pulse part the pulse aspect of this is important right when you can keep it under that like you said in the beginning you know 10 12 questions it's very accommodating for people to jump in

[00:41:14] there and give their point of view and get out because I agree I do these for a living and and they do get fatigue and I understand that so yeah I love these little pulse surveys so yeah I think

[00:41:23] the nice thing is to we try to really lean on lean into actionable things that aren't about benchmarking benefit levels yep or you know what's your SDD policy it's more about what can

[00:41:33] what's actionable what can you do to improve or what are other people doing that's that's driving great value out of their processes that tends to be kind of our mojo around these surveys is to

[00:41:42] figure out what's them applicable advice that I can get from my peers via a survey like this and hopefully that's that's the kind of insight we bring from them yeah Julie maybe what we can do is you

[00:41:53] know you do you've got payroll you've got the leave we did it you're going to do the component maybe we do an experience offshoot from that like a leave experience a compact experience

[00:42:02] hey experience and sort of look at where all those things are are converging in terms of the user right and maybe Dave we can get some of that as insights you're talking about so absolutely

[00:42:11] yeah I love it and thanks for coming on data so fantastic it's always good to have you yeah fun stuff thanks for yeah yeah I'll make sure we get your contact in both

[00:42:19] Julie where can people get access to these um to these resources well I think we'll we have the infographic that's probably the highest level of one that will share with you or you can post

[00:42:29] where we're posting our bits and you can always reach out today for myself or out to the uh or out to the network we'll we're just about on the verge of a website release so

[00:42:41] so I expect by the time this airs you should be able to also find some of these research results at www.herinpolemarn.com yeah awesome well good look Dave you're always welcome to come on man we really

[00:42:54] appreciate your share and your insights and yeah good good talking to you both thanks for everything you're doing it's good thanks guys