Sparrow

At some point, nearly everyone will need to take time off work to manage a major life event: to manage serious personal health concerns, to care for a loved one, or to bond with a new child. However, the entire process of filing for a paid employee leave proves to be a harrowing one, and it is often a source of great anxiety for many. Deborah Hanus, the founder of Sparrow, saw the challenge first-hand when six of her close friends took leave from work for various reasons. They struggled to file for paid employee leave, struggling to coordinate with the state and insurance providers and their own employers’ HR team. When they made mistakes, they received inadequate compensation. Deborah reasoned that if highly educated people with excellent careers, such as her friends, struggled with the whole process of filing for leaves, then plenty of other people much also be struggling. However, the problems don’t stop at the employee level, but extend to the HR departments of organizations that also struggle to coordinate required notices, state filings, insurance filings, and payroll. This labour-intensive and error-prone process takes hours to coordinate a single employee leave, wasting countless hours that could have been spent on other important projects within the company. This insight prompted Deborah to establish Sparrow, with the overarching goal of assisting both employees and employers in better managing all elements of leave management.

Sparrow automates all processes for both the company’s human resources, payroll, and management teams, and for its employees, making managing employee leave straightforward and stress-free. The company provides a modern, end-to-end leave management HR software to simplify all types of leaves. With this automation, Sparrow completes all necessary paperwork and tracks the status of each employees’ leave, thereby giving clients insight into what to expect without having to contact the employee directly. Sparrow also benefits employees.

The Sparrow experience ensures that the HR team, payroll team, compliance team and the employee don’t need to focus on the logistics of the leave, rather they can focus on the reason for the leave

They do not have to spend their time off working on compliance issues and legalese, but instead they spend the time off focused on the reason they took leave. “We are able to function as a part of a company’s HR team and provide a high touch personalized support to employees,” says Deborah.

As a pioneer in the market of tech-enabled leave management, Sparrow seamlessly integrates with a client’s human resource information system (HRIS) to automatically assess whether an employee is qualified for job protection, as well as what kind of benefits they are entitled to when they request for leave. Based on the information gathered, the company can then build a bespoke plan that is compliant with the company, state, and federal leave policies. In addition, Sparrow also guarantees that all relevant notices are sent to employees on time. The company also supports HR departments by offering a real-time reporting HR dashboard that ensures both the client and the employee are in sync throughout the process. Sparrow’s service also helps HR professionals better understand of how their leave policies measure up to other organizations of comparable size and industry. “The Sparrow experience ensures that the HR, payroll, and compliance teams, and the employees don’t need to focus on the logistics of the leave,” says Deborah.

Proven Track Record of Customer Excellence

To illustrate the competency of the rapidly growing software startup, Deborah cites an instance where the company provided its services to a large firm with several thousand employees and outperformed expectations. As the client’s team was distributed nationwide, the management did not know each employee’s leave status and therefore was unable to determine who qualified for family and medical leave (FMLA). This became a major concern when the firm acquired company in New York, prompting them to hunt for a leave management solution to ensure that they were accurately submitting all relevant FMLA paperwork. Sparrow supported them in not only ensuring that the employees received all of the requisite FMLA notices but also in filing for short-term disability and state benefits for each employee and in saving payroll expenditures. Ultimately, the firm saved about a million dollars annually, which more than paid for their investment in Sparrow.