How ŌURA scaled employee leave management for its growing team

Founded in Finland, ŌURA is the tech-wellness company behind the ingenious—and super sleek—smart ring, Oura Ring. Oura Ring tracks over 30 unique biometrics, giving each wearer key information about their sleep patterns, activity levels, and stress responses.

As a company, Oura is dedicated to helping people make more informed decisions about their bodies and lifestyles. Oura provides daily health insights and practical tips to improve your well-being. Oura membership also includes in-depth sleep analyses, trends over time, and heart rate monitoring.

Since its start in 2013, Oura has helped millions of people around the world take control of their health—and has grown to more than 600 global employees. When the company needed help managing employee leaves, they turned to Sparrow.

Leading with employee wellbeing

Oura’s mission is to empower every person to own their inner potential—starting with their own employees. That’s why Oura is committed to supporting employees physically, emotionally, financially, and professionally.

“We’re committed to meeting the needs of our team,” said Kathryn Berry, HR Specialist at Oura. “We consistently request feedback to better understand the unique needs of our employees and think creatively to address them.”

That starts with creating a robust suite of benefits that includes flexible working hours, remote working arrangements, wellness benefits, and an Oura Ring. Along with 13 paid holidays, four weeks of paid time off, and 12 weeks of paid parental leave, the company gives each employee eight days of flexible wellness time off.

“We really want employees to determine what wellness means to them, whether it’s a mental health day or taking time off to spend with their family,” Berry explained. “We want to make sure employees have those days to spend if they need it.”

Other favorite benefits include a discounted Peloton membership through Sequoia, virtual physical therapy through Omada, mental health resources through Spring Health, and fertility support through Carrot Pro.

Oura knows that offering benefits only goes so far, though—they also need to help their employees make the most of their benefits. That’s one of the main reasons they reached out to Sparrow for full-service employee leave management.

The challenge: Managing leave for a growing remote-first company

Before Sparrow, Berry’s small team handled leave administration themselves—but coordinating employee leaves for a remote-first company proved challenging.

“We had many different state leave laws to consider and limited bandwidth,” she explained. “Trying to research the specific laws of each state was difficult and time-consuming.”

Berry and her team were caught up doing research, reviewing checklists, calling state agency representatives, and manually entering employee information into the Excel spreadsheet where they tracked leaves. Leave-related tasks gradually consumed more and more of the People team’s time.

On top of the heavy administrative load, Oura’s employee experience was suffering. “There was a lot of frustration and confusion for employees taking leave when dealing with the State,” Berry explained. “They didn’t know what to file, where to go, what the deadlines were, or how much payment to expect.”

Trying to provide answers and guide employees through the filing process took a significant amount of time and patience. Motivated by their growing administrative burden and employees’ frustration, Oura’s People team decided to look into leave management providers, ultimately partnering with Sparrow.

The solution: Entrust Sparrow with leave management

Berry and her team partnered with Sparrow to accomplish two essential goals: 1) streamline leave administration and 2) give Oura employees a stress-free leave experience.

With Sparrow, Berry doesn’t have to handle paperwork, stay up to date on leave laws, or coordinate with employees—Sparrow does it all. “An immense burden has been lifted off my shoulders, and a lot less stress,” she said.

Not only does Sparrow navigate the claims process for each individual state, but they also file all the benefits paperwork for Oura’s People team. They coordinate with health insurance providers and state agencies throughout the filing process and keep HR and payroll updated on key dates and changes.

“I really like the Sparrow dashboard as well, and how colorful and easy to read it is,” Berry added. “Our Excel sheet was crazy and chaotic, but the dashboard is very detailed—you can see who’s out on leave and when they’re coming back. Plus, the pay schedule is broken out really nicely.”

Sparrow also guides Oura employees through every step of the leave process. During an introductory phone call, a Sparrow Leave Specialist breaks down everything employees need to know, including which benefits they’re entitled to, how they’ll get paid, and what the processing timeline is like.

From there, Sparrow completes and submits the paperwork on behalf of Oura employees, taking the time to follow up with insurance providers and state agency representatives to get additional information and check application statuses.

“Because Sparrow is handling communication with our employees, we also don’t get many questions for our payroll team, which is a bonus,” Berry added.

“Employees used to have lots of questions about their pay and how it all worked, but now they don’t because it’s very easy to read on the dashboard and they have all the information at their disposal.”

With Sparrow on their side, Oura employees have the smooth, painless leave experience the People team has always hoped for. “I feel for the employees that had difficult leaves before Sparrow,” said Berry. “I can’t wait to show Sparrow off to the people who’ll eventually go out on leave again and have a new and improved experience.”

In the meantime, Berry appreciates her own new and improved experience. “I enjoy working with the team at Sparrow,” she said. “I really look to the Sparrow team as our personal leave advisors.”

The result: More time and energy to enhance the employee leave process from every angle

“Now I really enjoy working on parental leave and thinking about how we can improve it,” Berry added. “What are we missing, what can we improve? I can invest more time into researching what’s going on in the Parental leave world and finding new ways to bring those trends to Oura.”

One critical component of leave she’s currently working on is the return-to-work process. “When employees come back from leave, they need support,” Berry explained.

“We want to improve that process and give employees the tools to adjust to new changes at work and at home and feel comfortable and capable while doing it.”

Lighten your administrative load while transforming the employee leave experience. Try Sparrow. See our offerings or book a demo today.