DEI and caregiving benefits

Stephanie Schomer, Editor-In-Chief, Employee Benefit News; Katasha Harley, Chief People Officer, Bravely; Jeni Mayorskaya, Founder & CEO, Stork Club

Transcription:

Stephanie Schomer (00:09):

Everyone, thanks for being with us today to discuss DEI and Caregiving benefits. We have a great talk today. I'm joined by Jeni Mayorskaya, Founder & CEO of Stork Club, and Katasha Harley, Chief People Officer of Bravely. Before we get into it, I would love if you guys could introduce yourself, share a little bit of your background and your organization and I also know that you both have very personal journeys to Caregiving and feelings about Caregiving, so I'd love if you could kind of tell us about yourselves in that context a bit before we dive into it.

Katasha Harley (00:40):

I would add to this, sure. Hello everyone. Katasha Harley again, Chief People Officer of Bravely. I have been a client of Bravely twice, so if you don't know, Bravely is an employee coaching platform, if you will. So we offer career coaching to all levels of organizations, not just C-Suite or manager. And I brought Bravely over to the New York Times, so when I was there heading up learning and development and then also to Food 52, a startup company and loved it so much that I joined Bravely directly. And my personal journey with Caregiving is twofold. I'm a single mom by choice entered and started the New York Times when I was seven months pregnant and I thought they were crazy to say, Nope, we want you to. I was like, no, I'll back out. I'll see you another time. And that was transformative for my career. And then I also co-parent so I have two children, an eight year old and four year old, and those have been transformative experiences for me professionally with how I even think about Caregiving in the workplace. And I've also taken care of my mom who's now deceased. So I've seen it both from elder care and childcare.

Stephanie Schomer (01:55):

Great, thank you! Jeni!

Jeni Mayorskaya (01:57):

My name is Jeni Mayorskaya. I feel very lucky that I've been in the technology industry for almost two decades and built products used by millions of people across the world right now. And my journey in Caregiving started actually my early twenties and I was diagnosed with some reproductive health issues and it was a shocker to me as I think to any people who get diagnosis like this. The next question was like, well, what I'm going to do with this? Because I was in technology, I delved so deep into research how it all works and why we might get infertility diagnosis and what are the options. And that really just seeing how many people struggle and I in the same shoes really inspired me, well, can you just leverage all of my experience in technology and put this solution together to help us navigate the journey?

(02:54)

And then very quickly in the starting store club I realized that hey, it's not just about fertility journey anymore, right? Because maternity care, the way we see it right now was created almost a century ago and it was mostly for a heterosexual couple then a woman in her twenties would have a child and mostly stay at home after that. But this is just not how the modern family looks like anymore. And that gave me even more, I would say inspiration to redesign, inclusive family building care to include all group of populations, gender, race, age, younger parents, etcetera. And this is what we are building a store club.

Stephanie Schomer (03:36):

Well, I think it's so interesting that you said really attempted to solve this problem from every stage of the family building journey. And I'm very curious to hear you talk a little bit more and you as well Katasha about why the Caregiving part of a family building really is a DEI issue. And we had a panel yesterday about fertility and how that's so important to offer equitable fertility benefits, but I think Caregiving often gets lost in that conversation. So why is it so important to look at that through that really inclusive lens as well?

Jeni Mayorskaya (04:07):

I would bring two factors and Katasha please join. I would say what we see, the two major factors is that the first one is again, times have changed. We live in a very different world right now versus again decades ago where both parents work and it's extremely complicated. They have a family and a successful career nowadays. So we really have to support people. And then the second one is success and outcomes for different clinical procedures. Even simple birthright or even natural pregnancy, natural conception, they actually have outcomes very different for different groups of population. It's not obviously a secret that many groups of population in the United States have different access to care and in rural areas for bipo population, this accesses really limited. So in order to actually see people succeeding and thriving, we cannot use a cookie cutter. We have to really understand how do we tailor care for them so we can see real results.

Katasha Harley (05:12):

Definitely, so I think this trip is an example for me. So as a single mom, the amount of effort to make sure there was care for my children at home, and it's not the standard sitter or daycare, it's summer, all those things that go into it was a lot. And it's probably not something I am the employer as the head of people, but it's not something that your employer thinks about. They ask you to go on a trip and they don't think about all the things that happen at home for you to get there. This is, so I have my phone because I want to share some stats around Caregiving and then I'll put the phone away. I don't want to profess to say wrong numbers, but in 2020, 3.5 million mothers living with school-aged children left the workforce and most of us are aware of that. There's another stat that says American women and girls basically provide 1.4 trillion of unpaid labor. So if you think about the amount of mental, physical tax, that means for every single woman it's really hard and it's a topic that we don't talk enough about and it causes a lot of anxiety in the workplace that is not being addressed or shared.

Stephanie Schomer (06:40):

Well as an HR leader, how do you try to think differently? Like you said, when you're here on this trip, your employer wasn't thinking about what that means for your children. So how can employers start to think through that lens? What are the steps to that?

Katasha Harley (06:55):

And so that's where and hopefully we'll talk about this a little bit later, but I talk a lot about equity versus equality. So when you think about the benefits that you're offering, have you thought about it through the lens in which your employees sit and live? And so there are ways to look at, so when you think about backup childcare, even that name alone, I think it's just backup care in general, whether it's for elders, what maybe you have a pet, people are like, there's so many things to consider when traveling and it's do you provide stipends? To me going on a business trip isn't like backup. It's foundational to being successful at work. And how do you cover not only expenses on the trip, but the expenses that your employees are having because of the work that they're doing, for you.

Stephanie Schomer (07:52):

Jeni, you mentioned the importance of store club being able to really work with employers to start to find those specific solutions that work for their employee groups. What are some of the tangible ways that you could do that? I would love an example of if you were working with Katasha, how do you figure out what really makes sense for Brave Lee's population and start to form around that?

Jeni Mayorskaya (08:10):

Totally, well, I have so much to share that it might be too much, so I'll try just to focus on some basics. I think based on Katasha historian, of course it's so common right now and it's inspiring to see how women are becoming significantly more active in business. But again, we have to help. We cannot just hope that it's going to work out somehow or someone else will solve this problem. And so for backup care or childcare we don't just again, give only success access to fertility care, but instead we actually have partners. So we integrate solutions such as backup care childcare it definitely goes beyond that. We also provide unlimited telehealth at every stage of a family building journey. So for example, just having a very quick call with a pediatric nurse and just understand, hey, especially for first time moms, what I experienced is a even normal, just like to keep your mind at peace is just so crucial and things like that.

(09:12)

One thing also comes to mind about equity. I completely agree with you that it's really important to almost tailor your support and overall even compensation package, I would say for particular groups of population, we touched that topic on yesterday grade session with our customer. They're not worldwide and it's a fascinating idea. Then you see just let's say some people who are getting a family later in life, they might use IVF care more commonly and unfortunately it just IVF is known for higher risk of miscarriage versus a regular conception. And it might sound like a fancy perk, but given just a leave for grieving for pregnancy loss is becoming very common in Europe and many companies in the United States actively adopting this as well. And of course, no, it's not everyone's going to use it, right? And it's going to be targeting very specific population, but just making sure that you know how hard it is providing this empathy and walking the talk is really important.

Katasha Harley (10:22):

Very important. And I would say even with bereavement leave, because that does come up and certainly has come up for me to provide it for miscarriages for instance. That's why I love if you can do it unlimited pto. So when you talk about equity as well, it takes the stigma off. Maybe somebody doesn't even want to share that they lost. And especially with ivf, it may happen multiple times. And so it's a very socially social emotional kind of challenge to go through. So I think unlimited PTO is awesome. When you think about paid sick leave, paid parental leave, paid, paid, paid, it's really subsidizing the cost so that you can have more productive, a more productive workforce. There's dividends the organizations, it isn't as if you're doing anyone a favor necessarily, it actually benefits your bottom line.

Stephanie Schomer (11:21):

Well to the point of cost, I know that you've worked at, like you said, startups, very well resourced organizations. How can employers at every kind of stage and size find cost effective ways to lend that support?

Katasha Harley (11:32):

So I can say what we're doing now at Bravely, and I would love a partners like the store club to think about offering to any size organization. So at Bravely I'm exploring the idea of this, and I talked about it at a panel yesterday but of a wellbeing stipend. And so whether you need to access it for backup childcare, elder care, pet care you may want to, maybe there's an l and d or an interest you have in learning that's not covered by the courses that we have, but it excels and enables you and empowers you. And so you get the choice with how you want to use that money. And for a company of our size, we're 50 people we have a lot of contractors and so we're not big enough to use some of the big box companies that offer backup childcare. They straight up and I came from L'Oreal and the Times, so I come just expecting it. I'm like, what do you mean I can't sign up? And so I'm having to navigate this space of trying to tailor services from my employee base and not necessarily having all vendors that will support us based on the size we are. So then the stipend is something that's I think is going to be powerful for the organization.

Stephanie Schomer (12:50):

How do you both see the ROI of providing these kinds of benefits? I'm sure you both have quite a bit of statistics floating around your head about it, but I'm curious to hear you both speak about the return on investment.

Jeni Mayorskaya (13:02):

And do you mean specifically for DNI or any ROI.

Stephanie Schomer (13:05):

Just in general, just for a company to lend that support? What does it mean for totally?

Jeni Mayorskaya (13:11):

I think probably you guys agree with me given that we are entering very unpredictable times and right now it's very important that the program actually at least project the roi, right? Versus just talking about productivity or great loyalty, et cetera. So the way we see we are tracking ROI multiple ways. The big component is clinical outcomes. So given that store club not just providing telehealth and care navigation but actual medical coverage for treatments, and if we look at the top three healthcare costs for employers for self-insured plans, we see that family building is actually top three and very often number one because of maternity care mostly driven by really poor outcomes for unexpected NICU care, right? Newborn ICU and so many, the way family building care can help actually reduce their overall employer cost is we're providing high quality care. So we actually measure success rates through our curated networks with fertility clinics.

(14:25)

We're building a new network of doulas as well to help actually of doulas prepare. It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, it's a big announcement we'll make very shortly how basically these type of care can significantly improve outcomes and as a result drive significant savings for maternity care, but also at every stage of the journey. So for fertility care for example, we negotiate with all the clinics a package. So how do we help employer reduce the cost while still given access to the leading clinics again to leverage the outcomes. So we show this projected ROI to each customer working very hands-on looking at their maturity claims and seeing all the opportunities, how we can help. I want to also highlight for diversity and inclusion, I think one of the argument and we all will benefit from this as a society is that we can advocate for these type of programs to be adopted by the companies.

(15:24)

And one thing I see might be difficult as well, well how do you track outcomes specifically for diversity and inclusion? And this is what we see might be helpful is basically building out this almost KPIs internally. Well how do we market those benefits? And I by the way, highly encourage to market those benefits because people are looking for them and there's great statistics that it's like over 65% people would actually switch their jobs for fertility coverage or for some other family benefits coverage. And then just comparing those KPIs with your talent acquisition, DNI goals and people retention and we see that it's working, that it's important.

Katasha Harley (16:06):

I go too. So yeah, it directly impacts talent acquisition in a huge way. And then when I look at employee survey, employee experience specifically around wellbeing and based on the services that we offer such as what a store club provides, but also what does the experience feel like when you return from parental leave within your organization? So at a previous organization I worked in, we did pairing or mentor coaching matching with parents internally. So if you were a first time parent and we knew we paired you, matched you with another employee that was an experienced parent and it's like a safe space to talk about all I'm having trouble with breastfeeding or whatever it is. So we created social networks around that experience and that leads to huge dividends on retention and the fact that I had tremendous loyalty for an employer hiring me when I was pregnant and paying me, not me waiting the year in terms of having to make that decision to join a company. If you don't get paid for a parental leave, you probably you're, you're not going to join. So talent acquisition is huge and it often comes up in conversations once someone gets the offer. Can you tell me a little bit more about, they may not have discussed the plan but then it comes up and they want to know.

Stephanie Schomer (17:38):

I was going to ask if you're hearing those questions earlier in those conversations now and how much employees or and prospective employees are starting to feel comfortable asking about these earlier in those conversations as they're exploring many options they have on the market,

Katasha Harley (17:52):

It definitely comes up once we're at the offer stage and it's been coming up more even by men. And so we just equalize if you will, the parental coverage. And so whatever your gender is, you get the same level of coverage because you do need support in a home for the primary caretaker as well. And it's come up quite a bit within the past year during the recruitment process for me personally.

Stephanie Schomer (18:23):

Well, I did want to ask you both in terms of the many communities that employers serve, what are the different needs across those diverse pockets in groups that you guys work with? How do needs differ when it comes to the family building and Caregiving journey?

Katasha Harley (18:41):

You want me to start tremendously and so I think it impacts your words. It's different by age, it's different by choice. Are you going and go on this kind of IVF journey to become a parent and what does that mean? Do you need dual support? If you're a first time parent are you same sex? What does that journey mean? And finding a surrogate. And so there's so many different paths to Caregiving or do you have an elderly parent that may be aging or suffering from a terminal illness? And so they're very emotional. The common themes are they're emotional in ways that don't necessarily show up at work and you need to create spaces for empathy and concern and care and then also have support by means of benefits or peer group support through those journeys.

Jeni Mayorskaya (19:44):

I totally agree with Katasha. I would say it's interesting too of those questions. They are related. If people are not asking about some of this care, it doesn't mean that they're not looking or they don't need it. We see that especially maybe clutch companies or companies from industries where people are not necessarily in the office, people are not as vocal about their needs and the best way to do it. It's all about fighting for talent right now and it's a real world. If we want to invest in great talent we really want to make sure that we proactively address their needs. And I see based on our experience that it's definitely location based. Again, different states, even different areas have very different access to care. What are the gaps there? How can we close them as well as gender, race many others, what we do at store club beyond just the entire family journey, which consists of preconception and people that don't even thinking about having kids.

(20:45)

How do they make sure that let's say in 15, 20 years from now they would like to have kids? Is it even possible? You have to think about this in advance. And then assisted or natural conception, many people think, well natural conception, it's so simple, but it's actually not. And then support your call and then support cold pregnancy during birth, postpartum and then newborn care. You have to think about all of this as one journey. One of the factor if you are not thinking this is going to affect your budget is that outcomes might be driving the cost at all of this stages and actually exploding your budget. So connecting them together and addressing care for different groups of population, again is extremely important and help you save a lot of money.

Stephanie Schomer (21:35):

How do you make sure that people who need that care are getting connected to providers and support systems that really understand their personal journey? Heterosexual couple's journey and needs and comfort level is very different based on an LGBTQ couple's needs potentially. So

Jeni Mayorskaya (21:52):

It's a great question. I think this topic had to be addressed for so long time and what we do in store club, we make sure that our care team is very diverse itself. I don't remember exact numbers, but I think we're current at 70% of our care team is BI to make sure that we have this asset to offer and then people navigate our platform. They actually can select those experts based on their preference.

Stephanie Schomer (22:21):

That's great. Katasha, what do you hear from your employee base at Bravely in your past positions about getting connected to those support systems and providers that make them feel comfortable in addition to actually providing that care?

Katasha Harley (22:35):

So we offer concierge service. So from an insurance perspective, you can contact or benefits perspective. You can contact a third party concierge to help you navigate all your benefits because sometimes you don't even know where to start. And so as the employer, we don't get access to any of that information, but it's really having a guide and a partner through your medical journey, if you will, if that's what it's about at Bravely. And it you'd be surprised to consider how much it comes up in the average day-to-day work. So for clients that we support, we offer, we also offer identity matching. So if you're coming to Bravely for career coaching, and it may be planning for your leave or how to delegate work or fear of your job being somewhat at risk for the time that you're taking off. And you can choose to select someone based on gender, based on race, based on however they may identify in terms of their sexuality, whatever it might be. And we often have employees coming to us to help navigate their time away, whether it's for new parents or elder care, whatever it might be.

Stephanie Schomer (23:57):

Terrific. I don't think we, excuse me, I don't think we can have a conversation about Caregiving without talking about mental health. And I know this is important to both of you. How does this fit into this journey and how can employers do a better job of acknowledging that very, very heavy portion of this path to family?

Jeni Mayorskaya (24:16):

During covid, I think we all realize that mental health is healthcare and incredibly important. IT at Store Club as a part of family building Adventure, I would say we are all taken, we quickly realize, hey, mental health is so important because this is probably the most sensitive journey of your life. So many things can go wrong. So for us it's very important to provide not just support and access to mental health care experts, et cetera, but also provide some guidance in terms of curated content. Even to think about this, what should you expect when you're embarking, let's say on the IVF journey or even initial conception, how common miscarriage is? It's being pretty I would say basic knowledge that people assume that miscarriage is something wrong, but if we dive in the status, for example, we understand that it's a very neutral process of a body just not working with something potentially genetically not viable or there is some disease needs to be treated. And I think just education even really helps a lot just going through the journey.

Katasha Harley (25:27):

I would, so I think about it twofold fr so from an internal kind of people perspective I try to focus on educating my managers. Someone said it yesterday, they're like the front line. And so it's very important for managers. One of the skill sets around emotional intelligence, which probably wasn't a high priority for managers 10 years ago, super important now. So we actually train for it and talk about and how do you create open space for your employees to authentically show up and share how they're feeling. So it may be something as simple as where are you at today from a one to five, you don't have to say what's going on, but having space to share from a benefits perspective, we offer all the services with regards to not only eap, but counseling services that you can access for free services where whether it's meditation, yoga, whatever you want to tap into because we understand the importance of wellbeing and so much so with the fertility journey or even if Roe V. Wade is so fresh now, even if you think about abortion, the number of women suffering in silence because of their choice and they typically will not say that they even had an abortion.

(26:49)

And so what's happening in the news in the world and do you have space to just say, Hey, I know some of you this may be hitting home personally, you don't have to raise your hand and say, but we've got you and we're here to support you and hear the services that you can access.

Stephanie Schomer (27:05):

I was just going to ask you guys, obviously we can't have a conversation about family building and Caregiving without acknowledging the recent news around Roe v. Wade. How are you guys responding respectively at your organizations? Jeni, you know and I talked about this and that you guys took some swift moves.

Jeni Mayorskaya (27:18):

Totally. Well I honestly didn't believe it's possible nowadays that something like this happened, but I'm very proud of our team, how quickly we reacted to figure out the solution, working together with our customers, and basically we just came up with a solution. And for us it was really important just to take a quick pause and understand how do we design the solution that it actually provides privacy for individuals, right? Because data privacy is the key in this type of matter as well as how do we ensure that customers actually are risk compliant, especially for self-insured plans, right? It's like the key here. And given that constantly evolving regulation state by state, how do we maintain all of this working in just in a good framework? And so we actually designed the solution that we are capable of integrating with a health plan and again, creating this really healthy framework for everyone. We also partnered with one of the companies to provide more context about local regulation which I think is going to be the first national partnership of such format. And we are just really thrilled to provide more context for individuals, right, because I can't even imagine how challenging this must be then. You just need to access such necessary care and you access is limited.

Katasha Harley (28:39):

Gosh, yeah, I think I've spent a lot of time in the past few weeks either with employment lawyers or benefits providers to try to understand the complexity of the landscape and being able to offer financial support for those that may need to access care out of state. And so this goes back to the stipend that I was developing Anyway, the key is I'm not going to ask any questions from, I'm not going to erroneously create a new group health plan, but there's the stipend if you need it for some other reason. We're saying we support folks financially that need to access care out of state. We can tap into that stipend. So that's what we're doing personally.

Jeni Mayorskaya (29:24):

Terrific.

Stephanie Schomer (29:25):

We have just a moment left. If anyone has any questions, please just throw your hands up. Otherwise we can let these lady, lovely ladies off the stage, but want to give you guys time to ask any questions.

Audience 1 (29:37):

Pandemic and what hybrid completely had concern with their I'm at home and kids are just in another room and there's still stress around that children are unsupervised, house supervised, but you're trying to work. So just what you can share about just different resources versus working as flexible work. And it's difficult. The world is different truly. I hear what you're saying. But also in that difference what additional resources are you offering to the at home?

Katasha Harley (30:37):

Well, for, I'm an example of it and I think it goes to, it also speaks to cultural differences. And so when I look at how colleagues show up, whether the children are onscreen offscreen, and you may have leaders that say, it's okay, we want to see your children. And I'm thinking, I don't want to see my child. I have to focus on this meeting so it sounds cute for a day or two, but month on end, months on end isn't so cute, at least for me. But other people embrace and it's all great. And so I've experienced it personally. So I think in terms of whether you call it backup childcare, and I think it depends on where your organization is. Clearly you have to maintain a budget. So if you already have backup childcare, I would say how do you consider a childcare subsidy?

(31:35)

Which is a little bit different, right? Because this is just ongoing care that you may need to access in a different way. So I'd say think through things like that. The other part from a people perspective is you do want your leaders and colleagues to normalize it a bit. So I do appreciate when someone says it's okay, whether it's okay or not for me is a different story. But I think initially people worrying about it, you need to take the worry out of it and say we're all adapting to this new norm, but then find what will make so one-on-one conversations, manager and employee, what's going to set you up for success in the best way? How can we work with this? I recognize what you're experiencing and I want to support you. And I think having an open dialogue about it as opposed to just seeing it and not saying anything about it or not checking in does more harm.

Jeni Mayorskaya (32:39):

We have seen really big success with telehealth during pandemic specifically then so many people were just terrified to go to your hospital if there are any issues, especially if you just have a newborn, you would probably try to avoid just going anywhere with the baby and keep them safe at home. And this is where what we've noticed is that for employees it also became, well, how do you manage the cost? Right? Again, so what we've done is we actually capped the overall cost for unlimited access to telehealth care, to help both employers but also employees to actually don't shy away from this asset and really leverage it. Because again, overall back to the roi, we see that if you provide high quality care and people succeed on their journey, they're staying healthier. It's better for everyone. We all benefit from this. And then another thing is also to agree with Katasha on access to information.

(33:37)

What we've also noticed is that people usually hesitate to share that they are pregnant for the first three months and because of that, they still might have might need access to information about this, right? Well what is my family leave? Or do we provide any childcare? Right? And they might be very shy to ask HR people. So just publishing all of this information on our platform digitally, of course given different location, maybe given different employment types, etcetera. So people can see this while they're at home and maybe don't see their manager for some time is really helpful. We see that people shared feedback. It was just so great.

Stephanie Schomer (34:21):

Katasha and Jeni, thank you guys so much for the talk today. Thank you to our audience. Appreciate it.

Jeni Mayorskaya (34:25):

Thank you.