Did you know that most people consider themselves underpaid? One study shows that 64% of employees feel underpaid despite receiving the market average. A raise might not help the situation — 35% of people think they’re getting shortchanged even when they earn above average.

Compliance is often the greatest challenge when administering your company's leave policy. Employees are entitled to time off in certain circumstances, such as family emergencies, jury duty, military service, or dealing with a medical issue. But the leave laws that grant these rights are a complex mish-mash of local, state, and federal legislation.

It seems like everyone I speak to these days is seeing a spike in requests for PTO leave, parental leave, FMLA, and the like. After a year of lockdown, it makes sense that people are now jumping at the urge to take some time off. And, if the requests haven’t started coming in yet, everyone on your team will need time off in the future, whether it’s planned vacation time or an unplanned absence due to personal circumstances. Yet, despite the ubiquity of this task, leave administration can be one of the most complex processes to manage in HR when you have a large employee population.

In today’s candidate-driven market, there is a stigma around securing elite candidates, and that it takes paying them top dollar to come to work for your company. And if you cannot, then your pool of prospective employees starts to dwindle.

I was recently reminded of a time when I was serving as the HR leader in an HR outsourcing engagement and one of my client's employees came to me with a query about family leave options available. This employee was about to become a mom through surrogacy, and she was unsure about what kind of benefits she could claim. Questions like, can adoptive parents claim short-term disability leave, like other employees do after childbirth?

Stress has long been a part of working life. In previous years, one in three workers said that they typically feel stressed at work. Since the pandemic, however, stress levels have skyrocketed, as employees have scrambled to adapt to a world of remote work while also worrying about their family’s health.