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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Talent attraction consulting firms

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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

Kathryn Larkin got her start in the world of total rewards as a lawyer, advising clients of companies like Deloitte on how to design benefits.

This involved a fair amount of problem-solving, Larkin told HR Brew. After a while, she said, “you wish that you could set things up so maybe you wouldn’t need to solve the problems,” she said. To design benefits with a solutions-oriented approach, she needed to be part of HR.

This desire for a seat at HR’s table led Larkin to take on a position as director of global benefits for Air Products, an industrial gas company, where she also served as their in-house employee benefits and executive compensation counsel.

After nearly 14 years with Air Products, the investment management company Vanguard tapped Larkin to be its head of global benefits in 2024. In this role, Larkin works with her team to educate workers so they get as much as they possibly can out of the benefits Vanguard offers.

Vanguard tries to promote physical, personal, and financial wellness through its offerings, and sees this mission as an extension of its business, Larkin said. The company views its 20,000 employees as its biggest asset “because they’re the ones who are actually doing the work that provides the shareholder value.”

To that end, one financial benefit that Vanguard touts to its workforce is a Health Savings Account (HSA) seed and match. The company puts $500 toward individual employee HSAs, and $1,000 for those with families, as well as matches contributions by 1.5 times what the worker puts into their account. Vanguard encourages employees to view HSAs as a long-term savings vehicle for retirement, Larkin said.

Once individuals turn 65, they can use an HSA for anything, though expenses that don’t qualify as medical are taxed. Because HSA funds roll over into the next year, “it’s kind of a pressure valve for individuals, you’re building this kind of medical nest egg,” she said.

There’s a fair amount of education that goes into positioning the HSA—which is offered to employees on high-deductible health plans—as a tool for long-term savings. Vanguard says she understands that workers may need to use the funds for medical expenses in the near-term, but encourages them to tap into other benefits first if possible so they can save at least part of their HSA funds. The company’s flexible spending accounts, for example, can be used for dental and vision costs.

“You will have medical expenses in retirement,” Larkin explained, referring to items like prescriptions or hearing aids. “So think of it as your 401(k) for your medical.”

Larkin’s team has employees focused on both strategy and operations. She described the latter team members as “the engine that makes the benefits run,” with a focus on troubleshooting any questions or concerns that may arise from Vanguard employees.

Vanguard’s communications team monitors questions that come through ServiceNow and flags any “pain points” that come up in the benefits process, Larkin said. “They’ll sit with me and provide a report and say, ‘Do you realize a lot of people are asking questions about X? We think we need to get out in front of this, something doesn’t seem to be working.’”

One of the most common pain points that comes up concerns medical benefits—which isn’t surprising given 

 and complex this area of total rewards has become. When questions about medical plans arise, Vanguard can direct them to in-house advocates with Aetna, the company’s insurance provider. The idea behind hiring these contractors was to allow people with specific expertise to handle medical benefits-related questions, Larkin said.

Such efforts are ultimately in service of helping employees “get every ounce of every benefit we have,” Larkin said. Whereas employers were focused on cost-savings when she first entered total rewards, that perspective has shifted today, as businesses now view benefits as driving the “total value proposition” for their workers, she observed.

In Larkin’s view, the measure of a successful benefits program is one that’s “highly utilized and valued.” Given this philosophy, it’s not hard to see why Vanguard’s 401(k) program, for instance, has a 98% participation rate.

“If you have benefits that people aren’t using, you’re wasting money,” she added.

A portrait of Kathryn Larkin, head of global benefits at Vangaurd.

Vanguard’s head of global benefits on maximizing value

The investment management firm’s head of global benefits said her team aims to help workers maximize offerings such as HSA accounts. 

Vanguard’s Kathryn Larkin wants employees to squeeze “every ounce” out of their benefits

President Trump may have recently declared English as the official language of the United States, but the situation is more complicated in workplaces like hospitals, which serve patients with varying levels of English proficiency every day.

Language barriers can affect patients’ experiences with the healthcare system, and in turn their overall health, according to a 

. Adults with limited English proficiency were less likely to report their healthcare provider involved them in decision-making about their care, with 63% responding that this occurred in the last three years, compared to 82% of English proficient adults. And these adults were more likely to say they were in fair or poor health (34%) than those who were English proficient (19%).

In light of such challenges, HR leaders at healthcare organizations are incorporating language certifications into their learning and development programs. Such programs may not only help current employees better serve their non-English speaking populations, but also contribute to their own career development, sources told HR Brew.

Novant Health, an integrated health system headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has employees who are interested in both English- and Spanish-language learning, according to Lauren King, VP, talent acquisition and workforce development.

Novant offers English as a second-language course through Future Forward, a training and advancement program it launched in August. Through the program, Novant pays up to $5,250 a year for full-time employees to take either degree or non-degree courses, including professional certification and English language proficiency classes.

“One of the No. 1 courses we see people enrolling in right now is actually Spanish-speaking for healthcare careers,” King said at an Oct. 6 panel during WBR Research’s HR Healthcare conference in Boston. Such opportunities appeal to “our care workers who want to be able to communicate with their patients at a different level, and maybe some of their team members and peers,” she said.

JPS Health Network reimagined its qualified bilingual staff program to give more employees the opportunity to apply their language skills in the workplace, CHRO Ashley Ridgeway-Washington said during a separate HR Healthcare panel. Her team found that a large share of Spanish-speaking employees were providing informal translation to patients with the network, which is based in Fort Worth, Texas. Since making it easier to become certified as an interpreter, the organization has seen a 23% increase in the number of qualified bilingual staff, she said. Pursuing a language certification “gives them the opportunity to provide more robust interpretation for our patients, and also get a differential for that when they’re doing it.”

JPS is also developing a program that allows employees to take on additional shifts to work as interpreters, Ridgeway-Washington said. The network typically spends seven figures each quarter on remote interpretive services, but finds “that the outcomes are much better with on-premise, in person interpretive services,” particularly in departments for trauma patients or maternity, women, and children. “So we’re really working hard to build a stronger bench of interpreters,” she added.

Workers in the healthcare sector may enroll in language courses for a variety of reasons, Katie Brown, founder and chief education officer for EnGen, a language upskilling platform, told HR Brew. She said her organization sees internationally trained healthcare workers seek out English courses so they can feel more comfortable talking with colleagues and patients. At the same time, clinical healthcare workers may seek to learn any number of languages—from Spanish to Haitian Creole to Ukrainian—to better serve their patient populations.

“The common theme is that we need to be able to deliver care in the language that reflects the communities that we’re serving. And that’s a ‘both, and’ situation.”

Whatever approach HR teams land on for incorporating language learning into their benefits, Brown said it’s a good idea to make sure these efforts are aligned with talent acquisition strategies. This is particularly true for sectors like healthcare, where employers continue to struggle to fill certain roles, and may be overlooking promising internal talent.

“There are opportunities to leverage existing infrastructure to help people get foundational skills…that could then be leveraged within the workplace to promote people from within and build talent pipelines,” she said.

Close up of a healthcare professional holding a tablet with a floating globe icon inside a speech bubble.

Why language upskilling is vital to healthcare employers

Healthcare organizations are finding new ways to upskill their workers in light of language barriers that can affect both employees and patients.

Language skills are increasingly in demand for healthcare professionals

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.

HRB WEB-Sword-Why Employees Aren't Using What You're Offering-video embed

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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