Don’t Have 43 Spare Hours To Figure Out Maternity Leave? LeaveLogic Can Help.
Anna Steffeney was working at a large tech company when she had her first kid. For her maternity leave, she took one full year off under a government-stipend leave. Because she was based in Germany at the time — a country where she was guaranteed not only one year of paid leave, but also three full years of job protection. When she later moved to the United States, while working for the exact same company, her colleagues gave her very different advice about planning for her next maternity leave.
Their advice?
Keep her pregnancy hidden as long as possible. Don’t tell anyone about it.
It was a startling A/B test: it was the same company, but two different countries. Her stateside colleagues hinted that performance reviews were coming, and that she might be dinged as less committed or left off of big projects if it looked like she was going to be on temporary leave.
But rather than take this advice at face value, it left her confused: she didn’t believe that this was the story her company really wanted her to hear. How could the same company have a very different message for her when she was in another location? She’d been in Germany for eight years and had the benefit of experiencing first-hand how her company had treated her with her first kid. This led her to ask: why was this happening? And was it true that it necessarily needed to happen like this? To her, it felt more like there a lack of transparency and it got her thinking that it might be possible to solve some of the confusion around leave options through a technology solution.
Of course, the United States Paid Leave policies are abysmal at best and parents across the country are grappling with how to create space and time to take care of babies against the cultural stigmas associated with parenthood, especially for women.
But cultural myths can be perpetuated even when they’re not entirely true, and Steffeney wanted to challenge the assumption that all companies were, at a default, offering little to no leave options, or failing to support their employees during important transition times. So, she started building what later turned into LeaveLogic.
How she started the company
LeaveLogic was created as a technology platform to help make leave options — the policy, documentation, and process of understanding and securing your leave rights and benefits — more accessible and less cumbersome for both employers and employees.
After leaving her employer to take on a full-time roll as a parent caring for a toddler and a newborn, she started LeaveLogic on the side, as a project between nap times and late in the evenings.
The opportunity she saw was twofold and could benefit both employers as well as their employees. Companies were losing a lot of talented employees who hit a vulnerable moment in their lives and couldn’t figure out how to continue the trajectory of work alongside their caretaking or health needs. In addition, companies were losing valuable employer worktime — to the amount of 43 hours per person in researching, navigating, and filling out paperwork in the process of applying for leave and health benefits.
On the employee side, humans who work face all sorts of complications in caretaking throughout their lifetime. It’s not just parents, but people who fall sick or get injured, those that have family members to take care of and more.
Through their software, employees can select what type of leave they’re taking, what city and state they live in, and what their needs are — alongside what their company provides — and get a clear picture of exactly what they need to register for, what forms to fill out, and in what order. By automating the process, this saves employers HR time, saves employee time and streamlines the ability for people to take the leaves they need.
The marketplace: open for competition
Finding out what your parental leave rights and policies are is difficult at best. Parents-to-be have to compile best practices and resources by combing through hundreds of articles, weaving together state, federal, local, and job policies. Resources like Fairy Godboss and Gusto provide how-to frameworks for setting up policies or navigating leave policies, but still direct you to researching state-by-state on your own.
Perhaps the strongest competition in this space is Jellyvision’s product, ALEX, which helps educate employees on leave benefits. So far, LeaveLogic has taken this and added in the navigation piece, making it so far the most comprehensive tool for anyone who needs to navigate leave.
One of the biggest ways technology can serve us is to make information more transparent and accessible.
Many cultural myths are whispered or outdated and aren’t up to date with the changes happening in both local legislatures and public policy. What used to be true about being unable to gain access to leave might not be the case, but without clear access to information, it’s hard for employees to know what benefits they might have access to.
Not surprisingly, 45% of people search through LeaveLogic after 5pm and on weekends, confidentially, as a means to learn more about what’s available to them and what their rights are as workers.
Once an employee sets up their leave plan, they can share the plan with their managers, creating a job plan on behalf of an employee, keeping everyone in the loop about what’s coming.
Ironically, employees can plan for retirement and vacation relatively easily because the systems and rules are in place, and the workflow is (relatively) streamlined, in most cases. But for taking other forms of leave, Steffeney said that “it tends to be this black hole in terms of transparency and information.” To take leave, they need to coordinate with HR, health insurance, disability carriers, and often a compliance workflow. If the State offers paid leave options, that’s more to coordinate.
In short, it’s an efficiency nightmare.
But it’s also an opportunity — one that LeaveLogic identified in advance: if the company could streamline the process, they could save their clients thousands of hours, in addition to helping with talent retention and acquisition.
How they’re acquiring new users
Increasingly, they’re seeing new companies reach out on behalf of their HR teams. “They can’t keep up with the number of questions people are asking them,” Steffeney said, which leads to a sales conversation about adopting the software. Saving 43 hours of paperwork and headache per team member is a huge win for small (and not so small) HR teams.
LeaveLogic raised their first round of funding in 2016, a seed round, and onboarded early customers. By January 2018, they were acquired by Unumgroup, the largest disability carrier in the space, a little less than three years after the company was started.
At this point, they no longer have to raise venture funding — with roughly 600 active users (that is, employees who are currently planning leaves), they’re able to build out their platform. “It’s really exciting to see how quickly we were able to build a product, get it to market, get customers, and then get acquired,” Steffeney said.
Taking leave from a company shouldn’t be as convoluted and messy as it is today. But in a world where policy is always changing, and we’re pressing for better leave options for all, managing the noise is something that technology — like LeaveLogic — can.
Corrections: Unum group was originally misprinted as UNOM group, and has since been updated.
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This article was originally published on Women@Forbes.
