Employees read leave policies the way they read every other signal a workplace sends. A policy designed around the bare minimum tells them something. So does one that accounts for grief, mental health, and the full reality of caring for a family.
Before organizations ask whether their leave benefits are competitive, a more useful question is: What do our current policies communicate to the people who work here?
Availability and usability are not the same thing
For the fourth consecutive year, leave benefits tied for second in SHRM's 2025 Employee Benefits Survey, alongside retirement savings and behind health coverage. Employees are paying attention to leave. Are employers responding in kind?
On the surface, coverage looks solid. The International Foundation of Employee Benefits Plans (IFEBP) found that almost all organizations offer paid sick leave (97%) and vacation time (99%), but a policy that exists on paper and a policy employees can use are different things. IFEBP also found that a heavy workload (44%) and inadequate staffing (23%) are the top reasons workers don't use their paid vacation days. For employees who can't take the leave they've earned, the policy stops functioning as a benefit. What it communicates instead is that the organization prioritizes output over the people who produce it.
Offering time off means little if the culture around it discourages use. The signals employees receive come from:
- Employers and managers who lead by example and take leave
- Whether returning from leave carries stigma
- If workloads are structured so that stepping away feels possible
Where policies fall short of what employees need
The categories where employers tend to underdeliver reflect the situations employees regularly face.
Parental and caregiver leave is one of the clearest examples. Only 9% of companies offer 12 or more weeks of parental leave for both caregivers, yet 64% of Americans consider that amount necessary. Employees in the "sandwich generation," managing both childcare and eldercare responsibilities, are a growing segment of the workforce. Paid caregiver leave for immediate and extended family declined in 2025, dropping to 31% and 17%, respectively, per SHRM’s 2025 Employee Benefits Survey. For employees who carry those responsibilities, that change is a real blow.
Mental health leave follows a similar pattern. AbsenceSoft's 2025 State of Leave and Accommodations report shows that leave requests increased for the third consecutive year in 2024, with mental health cited as the second most common reason at 47%. Most employers technically allow sick leave for mental health, yet many employees are unaware of it or don’t feel safe enough to use it. A policy that exists without clear communication and cultural permission produces the same outcome as a policy that doesn't exist at all.
Bereavement leave is a telling example. Roughly 90% of organizations offer it, so those employers may consider the box checked. Yet only 1 in 5 companies offer more than five days, and the standard of three days for immediate family is a legacy of funeral logistics, not grief. LeanIn.org's research found that both women and men rank bereavement leave among their top five most important benefits, even above parental leave. The message a three-day policy sends to a grieving employee is hard to walk back.
What a stronger signal looks like
Improving leave policy doesn't always mean adding new categories or dramatic expansions. Often, meaningful changes are about closing the gap between what's written and what's supported in practice.
A few places to start:
- Audit the leave types that employees request. Mental health and caregiving leave are driving the largest increases in requests, and policy design should reflect that.
- Communicate explicitly what leave covers. Employees don't use benefits they don't understand or feel uncertain about. This should be a consistent part of manager conversations and onboarding, not just once a year during open enrollment.
- Examine workload structures. If employees consistently can't take a vacation without returning to a backlog, the problem lies in the staffing and coverage design under current policies.
- Review your current bereavement leave policy (or consider adding one if you don’t have one). Adding a policy or expanding it by even a few days is among the lowest-cost, highest-impact changes an employer can make.
The question worth asking
Nearly one-third of employers plan to introduce new paid leave benefits in the near term. Before adding something new, the more productive exercise may be to read your existing policies the way your employees do: as signals about whether they'll be supported when life gets hard. The organizations that get leave right make a consistent, credible case that the people who work there are valued and cared for.
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