Building Paid leave: Why Information Sharing Matters

Economists have long viewed paid family and medical leave (PFML) as a key protection for families when workers need time off to care for sick loved ones, new children, or themselves. Like unemployment insurance, PFML provides the economic security families need at some of the most vulnerable moments in their lives. It also improves worker retention and labor force participation, especially among women.

As a wave of new states debate and adopt PFML policies, more American families could soon experience the upside, but only if states focus as diligently on effective implementation and delivery of PFML as they have on getting legislation to their governor’s desks.

Our team at the New Practice Lab has worked with four different states on improving the delivery of existing paid leave programs, or on designing new ones, and we have seen firsthand the huge amount of learning that exists at the state level. By accelerating information sharing across states, we hope to strengthen the feedback loops between policymakers, implementers, and families, and to help those building and launching new programs benefit from the experience of their peers.

Improved delivery in action: New Jersey

In 2008, New Jersey became the second state in the nation to adopt a Family Leave Insurance program. A decade later, the program had proven hard to use, and uptake remained unacceptably low. The program had driven a “positive impact on wages and employment for women,” according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve, and it had helped to shrink the gender wage gap. Still, the state was taking heat for how hard paid leave was to access, and for the program’s slow payout speed.

In 2019, our team at the New Practice Lab launched a four-week discovery sprint with the NJ Department of Labor (NJDOL) to figure out what it would take to increase uptake and improve overall user experience of the program. We interviewed everyone from beneficiaries, to employers, to advocates, to NJDOL staffers. We also held multiple testing sessions with potential beneficiaries, and analyzed sign-up data to understand where New Jersey’s process struggled the most.

As we dug into our interviews, we uncovered several problems. New Jersey has two separate programs that covered leave scenarios — Temporary Disability Insurance for injury and illness, and Family Leave Insurance for maternity coverage. As a result, people often found this confusing and signed up for only one when they were actually eligible for both. The burdensome application process was also hard to get through, which added significant delays for users. It took many state residents more than two months to get their first check, which meant they had to front money they didn’t have, or else pass up leave altogether.

In partnership with NJDOL, we identified and proposed both technical and programmatic solutions to these and other implementation problems, all by centering the voices of real users. The state made changes to the program, and it also invested in the kind of staffing that could continue to review and improve the program into the future.

Today, New Jersey offers more human-centered tools, including a maternity coverage timeline tool that helps expecting parents to have better clarity on their coverage dates. Awareness of the program has improved, and help is easier to access than ever; the state has continued to integrate feedback and improve their support systems, launching with a bilingual interactive voice response system that has reduced call center wait times from 40 minutes to just two.

Building a feedback loop: New Jersey and beyond

Fixing an existing program is one thing, but as more states pass PFML programs, there exists a critical opportunity to use the learnings of existing programs to drive better outcomes for the newer ones.

It’s the sort of opportunity we were presented with as we worked with New Jersey: lawmakers in the State of Connecticut were debating a bill in the legislature, and asked us to consult. With our experiences sprinting on different hard-to-use programs, we spotted several elements of Connecticut’s legislation that would have set the state up for difficulty in delivering a smooth customer experience. We suggested changes to the proposed program based on our ongoing work, ultimately carrying the lived experiences of paid leave users into the rooms where new paid leave policy was being made.

“Their expertise and feedback on what worked and didn't work to implement paid leave and other social programs was invaluable,” said Dave Wilkinson, Connecticut’s Chief Performance Officer. “Based on the New Practice Lab’s advice, we made several important changes to what is the paid leave law today based on their insights that would make it easier to implement and to meet people where they are."

Policy Meets Delivery

Connecticut and New Jersey were only the start. A key focus of the New Practice Lab’s work is Improving outcomes for families by deepening this feedback loop between policy and implementation.

As PFML continues to grow, the New Practice Lab has supported the teams responsible for implementing emerging programs, including teams working in Maryland and Minnesota — and translating the insights from that work into actionable insights for policymakers in other states. As new states implement and experiment with their own PFML programs, they add learning and insight to the collective understanding of how these programs can work better.

The key for lawmakers and paid leave administrators is to look for and integrate that learning, rather than repeating the mistakes of the past.

This effort to increase the flow of information from program users to program implementers to policymakers, and back again, is part of a broader shift in government that we aim to advance through all our work at the Lab. Paid leave and other critical support programs will be most effective when real user experience and lessons from implementation more easily and frequently flow upstream to inform the design of new policies, making them easier to implement effectively up front.

We call it ‘policy meets delivery’— an internal shorthand for the tighter feedback loop we envision between government actors and the people they serve. As paid leave programs increase in urgency and popularity, they are proving out the promise of this more interconnected, human-centered approach.