October 2022

Product Updates

Sparrow’s high-tech, high-touch approach to leave management means that we are constantly improving both our software and customer experience.

Enhanced Leave Payroll Plans

We’ve made a number of improvements to our automated leave payroll plans to help payroll teams, employees, and People teams better understand these plans.

First, Sparrow’s automated payroll plans now differentiate between employer pay for time at work (e.g. during an intermittent leave or when a leave starts in the middle of a pay period) and employer pay for time on leave.

• For salaried employees, these will be labeled as “Employer Regular Pay” and “Employer Leave Pay” in our reports. We continue to show an “Employer Total” so you can easily see the total amount due from you.

• For hourly employees, this works similarly except you will see a “TIMESHEET +” placeholder for the regular pay as Sparrow would not have visibility into the actual hours they reported on their timesheet.

Next, we added fine-grained labels employer pay sources to help you better understand and track the employer amounts due to the employee. These include: “Employer PTO”, “Employer Holiday Pay”, “Employer Floating Holiday Pay”, “Employer Sick Time”, and “Employer Adjustment” (used for reconciliations).

We have many more enhancements on our roadmap. Please stay tuned for more updates.

Single Sign On

SSO is an authentication scheme that allows users to securely access multiple applications through a single set of credentials, enabling a simplified and secure login experience.

We have started rolling out SSO support in beta for the Sparrow dashboard. With SSO enabled, your People team and employees will no longer use a password when logging into Sparrow with their work email and will instead log in via your existing SSO solution.

We currently support integrating over SAML, an open standard supported by most Identity Providers such as Okta. We also support logging in using Google OAuth if your organization uses Google Workspace.

HRIS Integrations

Sparrow can connect with your HRIS provider to import employee data and help keep it up to date. If you manage a high-volume of leaves, Sparrow’s HRIS integration makes adding employees to the Sparrow dashboard faster, easier, and less error-prone: we will pull your employee information from your HRIS and you can simply look them up on our dashboard by their work email address. Additionally, we can keep critical data like salary information up to date automatically to ensure we make accurate estimates for leave benefits.

We use open standards for integration and can integrate with any HRIS that supports pushing census files in the format we specify over SFTP. We have successfully integrated with many providers including Workday, ADP and Paylocity.

Our roadmap for next year includes support for outbound integrations to allow us to push data about leaves directly into your system. We’ll share more updates as they’re available.

If you are interested in either of the SSO or HRIS integrations, please reach out to your dedicated Sparrow team at [email protected], and we will get you started.

Customer Spotlight

A fast-growing leader in security information and event management (SIEM), Exabeam gives security teams the tools to uncover, investigate, and resolve threats in record time. Exabeam partnered with Sparrow as part of their renewed focus on Employee Care. Learn How Exabeam Transformed Employee Care.

Compliance Updates

Paid Family & Medical Leave

California (San Francisco only) 

Effective Oct 1, 2022

According to San Francisco’s new Paid Public Health Emergency Leave Ordinance, eligible employees are entitled to employer-paid leave during a public health emergency.

District of Colombia

Effective Oct 1, 2022

The maximum duration of paid leave benefits (including parental leave, family leave, and medical leave) will be 12 weeks.The 2 weeks of prenatal leave will continue to be available to birthing caregivers.There will be no claim waiting periods

New Hampshire

Effective Jan 1, 2023

New Hampshire’s voluntary Granite State Paid Family and Medical Leave program has selected MetLife as its state-approved carrier.

New York 

Effective Jan 1, 2023

There have been a few updates to New York Paid Family Leave:

• Employees taking Paid Family Leave receive 67% of their average weekly wage, up to a cap of 67% of the current New York State Average Weekly Wage (NYSAWW). For 2023, the NYSAWW is $1,688.19, which means the maximum weekly benefit is $1,131.08. This is $62.72 more than the maximum weekly benefit for 2022.

• The list of family members for whom eligible workers can take Paid Family Leave to care for will include siblings with a serious health condition. This includes biological siblings, adopted siblings, step-siblings and half-siblings. These family members can live outside of New York State, and even outside of the country. 

Washington 

Effective Jun 9, 2022

WA has updated its form and requirements for postnatal leave:

• Birthing caregivers who are not taking prenatal leave and have a standard delivery will only need a certification of birth form to certify their leave. They will no longer need a Serious Health Condition (SHC) form. 

• There will be no waiting period for post-natal leaves. 

• Birthing caregivers taking prenatal leave and/or deliver via c-section will still need to submit a SHC form, if they would like to receive the 2 additional weeks.

Job Protection

Adoption Leave 

Alabama, Arkansas, and Kentucky have introduced or revised their adoption leave laws to push for the equal application of parental leave laws and any associated benefits, to both biological and adoptive parents. For example, Kentucky has introduced a 6 week adoption leave law which is unpaid unless employers provide paid parental leave to biological parents.

Kin Care Leave

Kin Care Leave is time provided to employees to take time off to care for a family member. Illinois and Maine have introduced or revised Kin Care Laws.

Employee Leave in the News