Ep 32. Reimagining Leave: How Deborah Hanus, CEO of Sparrow Is Transforming Compliance and Compassion in HR

In this episode of the TroopHR Podcast, host Taylor Bradley sits down with , CEO and founder of Sparrow, to uncover why employee leave remains one of the most complex, costly, and emotionally charged responsibilities in HR. From a background in reinforcement learning at MIT and Google Brain to building a leave management platform that’s already saved organizations over $200 million in payroll costs, Deborah shares her remarkable journey into the intersection of AI, compliance, and compassionate employee care.

The conversation dives deep into how fragmented legislation and outdated policies have left HR leaders overwhelmed and employees unsupported. Deborah explains how technology, when paired with policy insight and empathy—can not only simplify compliance but transform employee experiences during some of life’s most critical moments. Hear powerful stories of NICU stays, stillbirths, and unexpected crises that underscore the real-life impact of modernizing leave policies, along with actionable tips for designing inclusive and forward-thinking programs that protect both people and business outcomes.

To learn more about creating thoughtful leave strategies or to access Sparrow’s 2025 Leave Benchmarking Report, visit sparrow.com.

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Credits
TroopHR Founder: Tracy Avin
Show Producer: Nicole Fealey
Show Host: Taylor Bradley

Note: Transcripts generated by AI.

Transcript

 You don't want to be at work while your child is fighting for its life in the hospital. To be able to show up for your employees in a moment like that, we'll do so much for employee retention.

Welcome to the Troop HR podcast. I'm your host, Taylor Bradley. Today's episode touches on something every HR leader deals with, but few feel fully confident in navigating employee leave. Whether it's parental leave, bereavement, or growing complexity of state by state compliance, getting it right is harder and more important than ever.

I'm joined by Debra Hannis, CEO of Sparrow, a world-class leave management company that's transforming how organizations handle leave with both empathy and precision from powerful personal stories to practical data-driven insights. Deborah walks us through how she's tackling one of hrs most complex challenges.

But first we start with her fascinating background of how she went from a PhD in machine learning to becoming the founder of a company, reshaping the leave experience for employees. My background is in software engineering and machine learning, which some people might say. How did he get into HR from there?

I did my master's in reinforcement learning at MIT like back in 2013, around two years before anyone thought that it was cool. I spent some time in Google Brain during my PhD at Harvard, and then there was this one six month period where six of my friends went out on some kind of leave, parental leave, medical leave, caregiving leave.

All of them struggled with the paperwork, the process, the timing. Half of them. Ended up struggling to even figure out how to get paid properly after spending hours on hold with the state agencies and hours with their HR teams. We started looking more into how HR is managing the process, and we found that in a lot of ways managing leave is even more painful for HR than it is for the employee just because in the last.

10 years, there's been all this interest in federal paid leave. But so far, instead of things getting passed at the federal level, which the all of the paid programs are getting passed on the state level, the city level, the county level. So for HR teams with any sort of distributed workforce, this has really just become like an ab, absolutely insurmountable problem, staying on top of everything.

And it seemed like something. That should really be able to be solved by technology like on some level. Fundamentally, it's making sure that the right people have the right information at the right time throughout a complicated process. And so that's where Sparrow started is Neo really trying to be the glue and connection throughout the broad ecosystem that touches leave and making sure that everyone has the right information when they need it.

So we started doing that End. 2018 is when we started and now we have just, we've managed 2 million days of employee leave to date and have actually saved our customers $200 million in payroll costs by making sure that all of that paid leave paperwork is filed away. It needs to, it can have a whole lot separate podcast with you on getting into RHA.

Before it was cool. Mm-hmm. But that's a different topic or a different deal. Now, anytime that I've led an HR function or currently leading an HR function, that and benefits are typically the areas that I'm so thankful that there are deep expertise that you can hire into your organization, but I've traditionally leveraged companies like yours.

But I first wanna examine the evolution. Of you have local laws, you have city laws, you have state, federal. What other areas have you seen that evolution hamper HR teams, and then how is technology with your organization starting to alleviate some of those pain points? Certainly as there are more and more states that have some form of paid leave.

Things have gotten very difficult for HR teams. There has been a good amount of activity on the federal level. It's just none of it is paid. So there are a lot more regulations for HR teams to stay on top of. And so what Sparrow does is we've built a leave compliance engine, which actually makes it so that when you are planning a leave, when you're planning what your leaves are going to look like, you have all of that information around.

Pay state entitlements, job protections, and making sure that all of that is available in one place. But I would say often creating a great leave experience actually starts even one step before that. And thinking through your leave policies and how they'll interplay with the vendor, even if you're outsourcing things.

Often leave policies are written, they're written by employment lawyers and employment lawyers don't necessarily understand all of the people situations that can come up. So something that we saw, fortunately, we see this less now, but something that we saw a lot when Sparrow started was companies using language like maternity leave and paternity leave.

If you do that, if you tie that gender to leave, that you can easily end up in a situation where two women who have a child together have twice as much leave as. Two men who have a child together, which certainly is not something that anyone ever intended. The employment lawyers weren't necessarily thinking of non-traditional families at the time that we wrote their templated policies.

One of, one of the things that using a vendor like Sparrow can do is it allows you to see in advance and prepare for those one wanting 1000 cases that might come up. I would say certainly not in traditional families are not. Not even a rare case anymore really. But it will also help you see these cases that are a little more like one in 1000, one in 10,000 and see around corners to be able to prepare for those to make sure that your leave policy will actually manage that situation and the way that you intend, no matter how difficult it gets.

And, and a private organization I was at, we utilized you all and. The experience that you've talked about it, it just shined through So many people were like, it was so easy to just get through the process and get to my leave, and that was the big upside for us. That's one of the reasons we did it.

Compliance is an important piece, but you mentioned something that would make CFOs ears per go. You've saved organizations $200 million in aggregate, and some HR professionals may not know how those savings come about. Could you walk us through what they may be actually missing by not using your service?

The way this works today usually is generally someone in HR and their legal team. Spends a lot of time digging into based, if an employee applies for leave in California, let's say, or New York, they'll need to say, okay, where exactly is this employee? What county are they in? What city are they in? Is there any extra compliance related to that?

Where do they need file for benefits? Because if the employee is in a state that has some form of paid leave, they have already paid into and become eligible to make a claim on that. If they have a qualifying event. That will allow often more than half of their salary to be paid, not by their employer, but by the state.

With Sparrow, what we do, you can think of that experience as almost like TurboTax for leave paperwork. So at the very start of the process, when we start working with your HR team, we'll review lead year leave policies to help ensure that we're really setting the partnership up for success. And that you're able to see around corners and see these situations that might come up and really have a policy that supports your employees no matter what comes up.

And also ensure, and then we'll also make sure that we, it's something that is benchmarked. We can share what other companies are doing and make sure that it's also something that fits within your company's budget. So we're able to create. A system that works for both the employee and the employer. And then on the employee side, you can think of the experience as almost like tur tax relief paperwork.

So we'll manage that intake and processing. And then behind the scenes we'll make sure that they're getting all of their job protection notices, like F-M-L-A-C-I-F-R, we can actually file that paid leave paperwork for them so that there's less of a delay. They don't make mistakes on it. You're actually able to make sure that the employee is paid at as expected, while also recouping those benefits in wage replacement that they're eligible for.

What's interesting is not only is Sparrow a thought leader in the space, but you really become like a thought partner for these HR teams of recouping costs, having a a more meaningful experience. What is a standout story in your mind? Where there was like a white ball moment, do you really help them drive some change in their business?

We are able to help our companies just e, even in the very first year that we're working with them, review their leave policies and see some things that they might not have planned for. I actually love to see a long leave policy. I think some people are like, why on earth? They're like. We, maybe they say we don't have that many leaves.

We try to keep it simple. We just have a parental leave policy. But often if you just have a couple of defined leaves, you are creating lots of areas for uncertainty, which can often create a less good employee experience. An example of this is, I spoke with a company recently who one of their first parental leaves resulted.

Having a stillborn, so a late, a very late stage miscarriage. At that point, the mother had already been improved for disability, already been approved for bonding, but of course there was no child to bond with and their bereavement leave policy was three days. When you go through situ a situation that is that difficult.

You're not necessarily in a head space where you can say, alright, I'm going to go advocate for myself in HR and we're going to design new policies and we're going to really make this more effective. Often what happens in that situation is that person just returns to work, so it's great. I have a three day bereavement and three days is not enough for a loss like that.

Yeah. It really is not like that is the loss of a child. And I think sometimes bereavement leave policies, they're written with the input of executives imagining this worst case scenario of what if this person with 15 cousins has all of their 15 cousins die in a six month period? Realistically speaking, that's not something that happens and there is a lot of space to.

Protect yourself from the downside there, as well as having a very compassionate leave policy. By even considering your definition of family making you, making sure that you are maybe for immediate family members, like a spouse or child, then maybe you should have, I would say something like two to four weeks is actually much more appropriate.

Even two weeks is a little light because if you need to arrange any sort of funeral planning. Like that's going to take up the full whole two weeks. That's not enough time to really grieve, think thoughtfully about how that leave policy will actually be used. And in the case of a stillborn, if you have a generous enough bereavement policy, you can clarify iko, you have time for medical recovery, and then you also have time for bereavement.

Seeing around the corner and thinking through some of these situations in advance, I. Can really just be so incredibly impactful, both from an employee experience perspective, so they don't feel like they need to go with a PowerPoint for why they need more leave. They actually can just take a look at the leave policy and say, okay, this is something my employer has thought about and this is what I know and this is what I can plan for.

Another, another, another two. Two other leaves actually that I fall into. The category of the unexpected that I always really encourage our employers to have are safe leave and NICU leave. A NICU leave is just, it accounts for more of the unexpected. You know what? Often a leave, a parental leave is only 12 to 16 weeks, and I would say that is.

Looking at the benchmark data that is normal and generous for the broad swath of the markets and, but then what happens if someone's child is born 12 to 16 weeks early? They might spend that full 12 to 16 weeks. You don't want to be at work while your child is fighting for its life in the hospital. But at the same time, you also, when they finally come home from the hospital, you want to be.

Available and able to bond with them and to be able to show up for your employees in a moment like that, we'll do so much for employee retention. Employee loyalty, A similar one is safe leave. This is before, it's actually, it's required in, I think, 15 states now, but really, I would say everyone should have it, which all it does is it just says that every employee has their, every state has some sort of required sick leave.

All it says is you can use that sick leave for or to manage your personal safety. It was written explicitly for, I think with more domestic violence situations in mind when you're having a domestic violence situation. Certainly you don't want to go to HR who may have met your abuser at the most recent holiday party.

You don't want to go to them and say, really say why you're going out. Realistically, there still is a lot of stigma around that, so we suggest broadening that just a little bit to victims of violence or crime. Having your car burglarized is much less stigmatized than domestic violence. That person probably still needs to take care of their personal safety and their belongings, but just by opening that up a little bit.

All you're doing is allowing people to use the thick pay that they already have to be able to manage this situation. But it really can be just so incredibly impactful in these situations that again, they, the employment lawyers probably weren't thinking of when they wrote the leave policies. When my son was in the NICU for a, a long time.

There's no way I could have worked. There's just no way that I could have been productive and. Not only did my organization have leave to cover it, which meant the world to me, but having the CEO and some of my other colleagues just text me, they were like, Hey, I know I probably don't wanna call, but I hope you're okay.

And I heard what's going on. That meant a lot, right? I was open with the team, what was going on. So it wasn't that someone was like sharing inappropriate information, but it meant the world to me. And that's where loyalty and trust comes from. And another point you made that is brilliant. Is executives optimize for a three or four deviation event from the mean of this could happen, right?

Yes, that could happen. But the likelihood is very small, right? Yeah. Most folks that I've experienced that use leaves, use them appropriately, use them effectively when they're entitled to it. And the final thing I'll mention on this point before we come into a landing here with a couple last questions.

Is where I see HR teams get into trouble is when they're not consistent and they lose sight of empathy. Mm-hmm. Having em, empathy for what someone's going through can go a long way because a lot of, I've seen the lawsuits and things like that typically come outta a state of pain that's been caused by an employer that could have been mitigated with the thought partner and like you all.

We're just taking an empathetic approach in the interest of time. Two final questions for you here is one, on this journey that you've been with Sparrow, what's one thing that you wish you would've known at the beginning that you now know? Honestly, on day one, I'm not sure I understood how complicated leave is like today.

Today it says essentially sparrow's tagline like Leave is complicated, but. It really is. It was something that we learned very quickly. I would say like in the first five to 10 li we managed, I think, and probably for the first one or two years that I was working on Sparrow. I'm like, this is such a big pain point.

I can't believe other people aren't working on this already. I can't believe this isn't solved already. And the further we get into it, and there are so many adjacent problems to solve as well. We did learn that one fairly quickly. And I would say in the spirit of answering your question, I think one other thing, one thing that really I was really excited about when I started Sparrow is I really wanted to create a culture and a place where all of the incentives are in the right place for people to really enjoy coming to work and be excited about what they're doing.

And I think this is, it's evident in a lot of ways that we've scaled the company, the way we approach onboarding, the way we. Approach our engagement surveys. But I also, I'm not sure, I also don't think I understood on day one just how difficult that is. Like it's very hard to please all of the people all of the time.

And I think that a lot of it, a lot of it does come back to, and probably the best advice I would have for someone who is trying to accomplish something similar. Is to hire for mission alignment. Hire people who are really excited about the problem that you are trying to solve as a company. Because it makes, if you are really, if everyone is really excited about solving the same problem, it can make the fact that your colleagues said something annoying or were misunderstanding.

You have a misunderstanding with someone else. It can make it make these situations a lot easier to work through. You know that you all are excited about and working for the same common goal, and this is just like a little bit of friction or a bump in the road. If people wanna get connected with Sparrow and you, what are the best routes to do that?

Absolutely. Our website is, you can find our website@sparrow.com and I'm also available on LinkedIn. You could also find us on any sort of social media at Sparrow, Inc. Then just the final point that I would make is I've spent a lot of time today talking about data and benchmarking, and we actually, every year, Sparrow builds out a benchmarking report based on our customer data, what we're seeing in the market, and we do a deep dive on a specific topic that is trending that we're seeing a lot of that year, and we just rolled out with our 2025 benchmarking report.

So please go to sparrow.com and you can download a copy of that and try to give, and it's like an easy way to dip your toe into getting some data to be able to have a real databased conversation with your colleagues and executives. You know, as you're thinking about leave it your company. Deborah, that's exactly what I'm gonna do after this call is go give that a download.

The second is, thank you for making my leave and spend time with my daughter Seamless. When I worked at my prior company it, it was deeply appreciated. So it's really cool to put a face with the N. But thank you again for appearing on the podcast. I really enjoyed our time. Thank you so much, Taylor. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Troop HR podcast.

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