“Family forming and caregiving is not just a women’s issue, it’s a human issue,” said Leigh Betancourt, the AVP of solution consulting at the fertility-benefits platform Carrot.

When picking family care benefits, health care coverage, and family policies, employers need to think beyond traditional caregiver roles and preconceived notions of what caregivers need, she said. “Who are the people you’re wanting to support? It’s your entire workforce. It’s not just women in the U.S., it’s not just focused around IVF. It’s the whole person and the whole workforce.”

Betancourt was among the experts on a panel titled “Building Continuity in Family Health Care, From Fertility Planning to Adolescence.” The conversion, which I moderated, took place during From Day One’s July virtual conference on giving working families the benefits and flexibility they need.

The panelists discussed all that “continuity” includes and how employers can keep employees engaged with their own health and the health of their families over the long term.

What Continuity Means and Why It Matters

Continuity of family health care comprises a number of things: consistency of care across the life of an employee, equitable benefits regardless of gender, access to health care and benefits across all business departments and locations, and reasons to use those benefits.

The Covid pandemic interrupted consistent care for many U.S. workers and their families. Forty percent of adults deferred medical care because of Covid-related concerns, and delaying or deferring medical care “might increase morbidity and mortality associated with both chronic and acute health conditions,” says the CDC.

It behooves the business, too, to keep employees on top of their mental and physical health. According to an article published by the National Institutes of Health, “continuity of care is associated with a reduction in resource utilization and costs.”

Continuity of Benefits Requires Universal Access

Continuity comprises offering the same benefits to all workers. Sharon Jean-Baptiste, the VP of Midwest U.S. operations for people-and-places solutions at engineering firm Jacobs, said labels are important. Rather than “maternity leave,” Jacobs labels it “parental leave,” signaling that they expect all employees to use the time for family-building. “We know it’s important that the language that we use is inclusive and does not make assumptions about someone’s situation,” Jean-Baptiste said.

Betancourt seconded gender agnosticism. She recommended creating a “benefits ecosystem” of options that work in concert and can be tapped by the employee as needed, like a “sandbox.” She used the example of an employee going through a stressful IVF process, an employee who will need more than just physical care. Employers should make mental health care access easy and “make sure that employees understand they have this additional resource right at their fingertips if they want to have more hands-on care.”

Employers should also plan for continuity as it applies across the workforce. Do the people who work in your Boston office, for example, have benefits and coverage that’s comparable to those of employees in your Berlin office?

Tricia Layde, global reward business partner for strategic projects and transformation at Smiths Medical, a maker of health care products, said the company realized there were major gaps in consistency of packages. “We’ve spent the past couple of years really focusing on facilitating and streamlining benefits across all of these various business units,” she said.

Parental leave, in particular, was inconsistent across countries. “Some countries were actually only doing the bare minimum in terms of legal requirements for those countries, allowing their employees to go on maternity leave, and other countries had varying lengths of maternity leave.”

Smiths instituted a global, 12-month parental leave policy. “The leaders in the company do feel that it’s really critical and important to have not only continuity of benefits, but also to show that they care about their employees being caregivers, parental leave, etc., and allow them to take the time to focus on their family.”

Educating Employees on Using Their Benefits

Sometimes what keeps employees from consistently using their benefits is not knowing how to use them and whether it’s safe to do so. “We see this a lot with Talkspace,” said Liz Colizza, who is the director of research and programs for the online-therapy company. “There’s still a stigma around mental health, and I think there’s also just a jump between ‘I have access to this benefit, how do I actually get that benefit started? And what does it mean? What am I allowed to do with it? Will my employer know that I’m using this? What will happen then?’”

Employees want their privacy protected, Colizza said. When an employee takes a mental health assessment, for instance, and they’re asked whether they’re experiencing depression, they want to know that information will stay private. She said Talkspace has added notes throughout assessments that remind employees their information is confidential.

Child-Rearing as a Series of Phases

As health care needs change across a child’s developmental stages, employers can help prepare parents for what’s coming next. From infancy to toddlerhood to adolescence, each chapter is its own adventure in health and well-being. And panelists said it’s just as important to ask working parents what they need as things progress. “Their voice is important to be heard, and understanding how we can evolve our benefits as well,” said Jean-Baptiste. “We have a dual role to play there in educating increasing awareness, but also listening to see how we can keep evolving.”

Identifying Benefits Your Workforce Will Use

For those that struggle to identify benefits employees will consistently use, Jean-Baptiste suggested using employee networks as focus groups, and then as test groups when the time comes. “Our women’s network advocated for expanding how we think about maternity leave,” she said about the move from “maternity leave” to “parental leave.” From there, the group recommended leave be afforded to all caregivers, “whether it’s those who care for children, a partner, or an elderly family member,” and then recommended adding a family-care benefits platform. “The women’s network group really evolved how we thought about that particular type of leave,” she said.

Jacobs uses these networks to test new programs and benefits, like its “returners program,” for those reentering the workforce, regardless of the reason for their absence. “It’s really been an opportunity to test out some things to really advocate for some benefits,” Jean-Baptise said.

Smiths, too, is making a point to listen to employee feedback to make sure its benefits are ones the staff will actually use. “We’re making an effort to listen to employees,” Layde said. “We have an employee survey that helps to hear what employees think about pay and benefits and other things in the organization. We try to look at what is most critically important to the employees from a benefits perspective so that we can provide that in the best way that we can.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance writer based in Richmond, Va. She writes about the workplace, DEI, hiring, and issues faced by women. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Fast Company, and Food Technology, among others.