Case study: How Eventbrite transformed their global family care benefits

Eventbrite, a global tech company, launched the Grayce holistic care empowerment to learn about the prevalence of employees caring for loved ones, support their well-being, and evolve its family benefits program to be more inclusive. Within a week of launching Grayce, employee engagement soared to more than 2.5X above expectations and people talking to each other and HR about how stressed they are from care activities and how Grayce was able to help them. For the first time, employees were given equal access to support for their families regardless of their or their loved one's location in the world. As a care empowerment solution and strategic partner, Grayce helps Eventbrite fulfill its commitment to inclusive care for all families, supports the company's business goals to strengthen employee well-being, and helps retain and grow it's workforce.

Transcription:

Julia (00:09):

So thanks for joining us today. We were going to talk a bit about how Eventbrite has transformed their global family care benefits and what we have seen on this journey we have been on together. So David, do you wanna share a little

David Hanrahan (00:24):

Bit? Yeah. Thank you Julie. I will tell a little story to frame the conversation. So I actually wanna rewind the clock all the way back to the start of the pandemic. So kind of March, April, 2020 feels like seared in our minds or collective minds that time, but so Eventbrite is a ticketing platform. So it is a software company based in San Francisco, but we have offices all around the globe. And at that time in March, 2020 when Covid really started wreaking havoc around the globe our business live events virtually stopped overnight. So governments around the globe are saying no more live events of excise and above. And that really zapped our revenue. And so we had this massive change to the company. And so one change was business. So one of the things that we had to do was figure out a new business model really quickly. And so we pivoted into virtual events, hybrid events, we kind of changed how the company operates, moved to a self-serve model, but I am actually, so I am not going to talk about that.

(01:23)

I wanna talk more about what Covid did to not only our company but probably a lot of our companies, which is we had embraced this remote working, so everyone was working at home. You remember that those times this event actually that this time in March, 2020 virtually impossible, but we were working from home. And Covid really shown the spotlight on that situation of the child sort of walking into the Zoom camera and really brought up a lot of these concerns that all our employees were having around how they were going to manage a new way of working, which is at home. I have a responsibilities if I am at home versus in the office. And those responsibilities include caregiving for many people. So we are suddenly changing the way the company runs. we are also starting to think about reimagining company culture and thinking about the employees whole life. Now that the caregiving needs are shown a spotlight on, we are starting to see a whole bunch of needs employees have at that moment in time.

(02:24)

It got us thinking about re-imagining company culture but also thinking about the employee's whole life. So I will share a little bit more about this on the next slide. So Eventbrite as a company had a pretty rich history of prioritizing what we call family forming benefits that includes, and we had a really good parental leave program, 18 weeks for all parents minimum around the globe. But at this time now in that sort of covid wreaking its havoc, we started realizing how much more comprehensive we needed to be around thinking of the family, thinking of family benefits, thinking of what families needed and beyond just family forming. So we are starting to see at Eventbrite at that time the demographics shifting pretty significantly. So the adult population around the globe getting older and soon eclipsing the child population on those Zoom cameras and having conversations with our employees, we are starting to see more about what their needs are around about aging parents ill family members children with disabilities.

(03:28)

I will share a quick story about me. So my mom had been paralyzed. She had paralyzed for 10 years and she passed away before the pandemic started. But in that 10 year journey, me and my brother were faced with questions around how we are going to help my mom and my dad have the care that they need. And I found that there was no sort of solution, there was no benefit I had at the company at that time. I was working at a different company that I could just turn to and say, Hey, how do I figure this out? What, what's care? What is nursing? When should I be thinking about these things? And that was a 10 year journey then. So now my dad has got early onset dementia and what am I going to do for him? My sister is an adult with this disability, she is in a group home.

(04:17)

But at each of those junctures, and I think of myself as a pretty common adult professional, I have got a caregiving need and I have no one to turn to. And so 75% of professionals now in the workforce are caring for a loved one in some shape or form and not just a newborn. And 79% of them are really stressed. they are stressed about emotional stress knowing what to do if I am in this sudden sudden need to provide care or the care need is changing, what do I do? Who do I call? And it takes up a lot of time. So if not for that, I would be able to focus on work, I would be able to be productive at work, but I have got this really stressful care situation going on. So go to the next slide. So this all brought up to us that we needed to be thinking more comprehensive about care needs for our workforce.

(05:10)

And so we are a global company, we have employees all around the globe and we wanted this to be global. This is not about sort of a US thing or this country thing. IT care needs sort of span countries. They span age groups. And so what we needed is this situation that I found myself in. A lot of our employees find themselves in similar situations. They need expertise. So they need help that is beyond coordination. So they do not just need someone who's going to say like, oh, I will Google search nursing homes for you. We need experts. And so I felt I needed an expert, I just did not have an expert. So we need expert advisors and we want something, a care solution that can be holistic, meaning it is emotional support, it is guidance, it is concierge services, it is a suite of things that are beyond just one simple feature.

(06:00)

And because we are a software company our employees, they like to manage the stuff themselves. They just need a platform. We wanted to have a personalized tech platform to meet them where they are at in the caregiving journey, which is very, it changes. It changes based on your situation and each person's care need can be very diverse. So that also led us to, I wanna make sure that we are talking with a company that gets this that can be a strategic partner to us as opposed to they are selling me something, they are upselling me on something. I wanted to have a strategic partner next to me. And so we want Grace, I will talk a little bit more about that and that experience. We will go to the next slide. You want add anything? Feel free to jump in. Yeah,

Julia (06:40):

I think a lot of what David shared, I feel like comes up a lot. So lately we hear a lot of companies that are saying, how do we actually create more of a consistent offering for our people around the globe? And how do we look like we are equitably supporting every employee no matter what their family looks like? And so more employers have been saying, Hey, we offer solutions for people with young families and we have been thinking about our people through life stages, but we are hearing more feedback from employees that they want help for all their other family care loved ones. So whether that's parents, whether it is spouses, whether it is siblings or even friends, they are pretty stressed out about this and they need something for those existing family members, especially when the birth rate's not always growing is high. So I think we have been seeing a lot more employers like Eventbrite that are looking at that holistically and that are also saying, Hey, maybe the thought about things as life stages is actually inaccurate.

(07:49)

And We will talk a little bit about what we found in Eventbrite's population, but it always surprises people to see, we literally see in who we serve at Grace, everything from 21 year old employees up through people in their seventies. And in fact, I got a call personally about someone who was pushing in their eighties who was still in the workforce and needed help. So having something that looks in totality and to David's point is saying no matter what stage of care you are in or who you are caring for or what your domestic, multinational, international family boundaries all look like, that you are going to have someone who has expertise who can take you every step of that journey, not just showing you the next step of the way. And that's a learning process. Even we do this every day and we do not know the entirety of what that's going to look like in a given employer's population, but working together, it is a lot about how do we be your eyes and ears and help you see what's going on and then think about what else you can do in your policies, in your ERGs, in the way you communicate what it is you are trying to accomplish and what you care about in your employee team and how you are living that through your benefits as well.

(09:01)

So a lot of themes at Eventbrite that are coming up more broadly in the population, I am sure all of you see in your day-to-day lives as well.

David Hanrahan (09:09):

It is felt like a pretty big shift. We were talking just out in the hallway that there, there is something shifting here. If we were at this conference a few years ago there may maybe would be one company that is doing something in this space that's providing solutions and now it feels like it is heating up in a way in good way. But I increasingly see people posting on LinkedIn about the a caregiving situation that they are in a care need C-suite executives and junior employees. And so when we chose Grace to partner with and provide a care solution to our employees there was a whole bunch of things that I found really pleasant surprises around that partnership. And then really being a partner to us as we are supporting the rebuild of the company culture. This includes thinking of the employee's whole life, the same that Julie and I have thought about this together employee's whole life needs at the launch level, we were together on executive comms, how we are going to frame it to a global workforce.

(10:10)

We have workforce, we have employees in Latin America, in Europe. Do they use different words in some of these cultures? Is there going to be cultural nuances we are going to have to in get right? We started thinking about it more as helping employees versus using words like caregiving in certain places of the launch. And I mentioned earlier that this was going to be global. So the reason why it was so important to be global was that as we were thinking about how Eventbrite was working, no different than a lot of other companies, there was a new way of working that was suddenly right in front of us, which is, for us, it really meant adopting work from work, from anywhere. If you wanna work from your home, if you wanna work from the office, we are being much more accommodating to where people wanted to work. But as if you are going to do that, if you are in your home, you are where you provide care for many employees. And so it became something that was actually, hey, this is part of the future of work in many ways, at least for us. And Grace really got that, which I found super helpful. So I wanna turn over to Julia, talk about some of the impact that you've been seeing just overseeing all the data.

Julia (11:13):

So based on a lot of David's guidance on how we approach his culture appropriately, we actually found some enormous uptake right out of the gate. So oftentimes you will see within caregiving, especially when you are framing something as caregiving rather than something that people necessarily attached to with language that they understand, you might see one, 2% utilization. And what we found instead was within the first couple months, less than two months, more than 4% of the population was already engaging. And that was people from around the globe. So US, Europe, south America apac, and the families were just, as we talked about, right? There was a lot of domestic families, but also international. And we very frequently see a lot of multinational families in some of our sub-sector clients ages were really ranging from the twenties to the sixties. And interestingly, a 50 50 split male female with people supporting the full range of care recipients.

(12:23)

So definitely a lot of elders, adults, kids, people coming with complex scenarios just like David's life with multiple loved ones who needed care. I think when I think about how event bright population really kind of compared, so one they were younger on average two, they were far more international on average, even with most of our clients are global employers and the gender ratio was very evenly split. And even more so I think than in some of the other clients that we see. And this is always a surprise to a lot of the HR leaders. A lot of people are assuming if they use the language caregiving, they are going to see a lot more women show up. We do not always find that to be the case. So I thought that was pretty interesting with event rates population and people were highly engaged. So we definitely saw this within your population right out of the gate there were a lot of needs that had existed, whether or not people were bringing those forward to hr.

(13:30)

So we call those care interactions. So there were 15 care interactions averaging per member per month. So that's people doing consults, messaging with their expert engaging with their educational content, their care plans, community, and connecting with other caregivers on the platform, managing their documents, their tools, their trackers, lots of self-guided support. And quite honestly this surprised both of our teams. The kind of reception that we had, it was like we knew there was a need but in putting that in there and addressing the need that was there, it really grew on itself. So right out of the gate three x growth within the first quarter. And at this point we have actually gone through and looked at the eligibility data and I will say this is still rough because we have not gotten to the point where we are doing the full look back on the entirety of the year with our regression analysis, but we have already seen a 250% improvement on retention. So,

David Hanrahan (14:33):

That is amazing. You just shared that with me out in the hall. So any time that you can do that to your attrition or to improve your retention said a different way is huge. So yeah,

Julia (14:45):

I think we have seen even greater satisfaction from the Invent right team than some other teams. Sometimes depending on the demographics of the population that's engaging, we expect to see different kinds of things around their retention or their satisfaction. there is certain subgroups when you look from a de and I perspective that have certain areas of greater or lesser needs within the population but people have been overwhelmingly happy. I think a lot of this also echoes when you have a global population really allowing those employees around the globe to feel that they are seen and supported, actually yields outsize dividends on a company because they are not used to having the same level of support within a benefits program. So we have seen a hundred percent perfect star ratings, five out of five, 10 out of 10 people are recommending Grace. And there is actually a long range we have spared you frankly on some of these bullets.

(15:45)

But across the board, in terms of employees feeling like Eventbrite really cared about their wellbeing, particularly given the stage of the business and going through some pretty significant cultural transformations over the course of the last two years, the fact that everyone really felt that Eventbrite cared about their wellbeing really meant a lot of those executive communications and perceptions were coming true and how people felt. And that was really translating a hundred percent of people felt that they were going to stay longer at Event Bright because of their access to grace, which I think now we are starting to see actually looking in the data not just at what people say they are going to do, but what they have actually done. we are really seeing people are indeed staying to a exceedingly significant scale and people are then reporting that this is preventing them not only from needing to leave their job, but also to take family leave or even need to scale back their hours.

(16:43)

Which particularly as I look at the years going forward just with an uncertain kind of volatile outlook and being able to make sure that the people you have on your team are going to feel that they can balance what's coming at them, even if they may not have the same level of staffing, for example, that they have had in the past couple years. So whether that's as say significant as being in Covid as an events driven business that completely did not have in-person events, to now being able to be in an environment like today where we are here in person, that really makes a difference in how those employees who are staying actually feel that experience. And there is lots of quotes these are some of the reasons why frankly I get to get out of bed every day. A single phone call made it feel like the weight of the world came off my shoulders. Grace has been a blessing during a chaotic and painful time for our family. So living each one of those kind of personal stories that come through really makes a difference. it is impossible to truly imagine what's going on in the home of the person who lives next door to you, let alone the person who sits at the desk next to you. So I do not know, David, if there is anything,

David Hanrahan (17:57):

I love that quote and it is not for me. I am so glad that that's the impact cuz I just feel like this is care needs are not going away as the pandemic changes or as the world changes. I think what we are seeing in the demographics, it just increases. Yeah,

Julia (18:17):

I think we have touched on a number of these things, but there is a number of things that we have been learning at Grace in terms of implications for leaders is they are looking forward, I think the topic of care and caregiving and what are the boundaries of that and what are the options that are out there in the market. And when I say I need a caregiving solution, does that mean I buy one thing that solves everything and what am I really solving for? I think that's one of the biggest things we spend a lot of time with employers on helping them to understand when is Grace going to help solve the challenges you are looking for and when is it something else? we are seeing a lot of employers are starting to come up that curve now but I think there is a number of things for employers in terms of implications. I know David as a CHRO will have a lot of thoughts.

David Hanrahan (19:06):

One that stands out to me here is the connection to DEI. So I love that our demographics, the engagement is 50 50 at Eventbrite so far but I feel like we have all seen a lot of headlines just over the past couple years about female and underrepresented professionals leaving the workforce because they are shouldering caregiving needs and care needs that are not being addressed at their company. So they feel like they have to leave versus having help at the company. And so I feel as though as learning for me has been how much caregiving is connected to your DEI goals. So that's been a big one. Another one is just I mentioned if we were at this conference a couple years ago, might not have seen any companies really touching on this. And suddenly now it, there is a shift and I feel like that fertility and mental health a few years back was starting to become thought leadership at companies like, hey, we are going to have a solution here. And that's our ability to be, have cultural leadership on some important topics. I feel like this one is one that the next time we are at this conference just going to be like, this is the thing to actually start out leading at your company, having care solutions for your employees given the shifts that we are all seeing.

Julia (20:17):

Yeah, I think a number of for example, brokers and consultants might say mental health is still the top focus for us. Employers are not necessarily asking about care or caregiving or some of them are, but they are particularly focused on backup care. I think, you know, kind of see these evolutions of shifts of what it is people are most interested in. And that's trendy mental health fertility more focused specifically on neurodiversity etc. And I think what we are starting to see across the leading employers that are embracing this space is more appreciation for the variety of how people's families are comprised, whether those are blood relatives or chosen relatives and trying to build more of an equitable and inclusive model and an appreciation that a lot of that's just going to look quite different than you expect. And that kind of means blowing up this whole concept of life stages and you can't really wait for employees to come to you and say that they have a need.

(21:20)

So five years ago did employees come knocking on the door of HR saying, Hey, I am having a fertility issue and I have got a mental health crisis? No, right now we just assume that that exists and that that's a need. And we put it out there and we actually say, we do not need to know whether you use it. it is there for you. We know that people have these needs and we know this is a way that we win by offering something that really is what a leading employer should do. And I think the topic of care caregiving is a very loaded term for a lot of people. I think the term has changed a lot over the course of the pandemic more frequently. we are now seeing it used synonymously with parenting and then everybody else. But if you actually were to go look at the data from the Federal Reserve people, the impact of people caring for adults and elders is actually four x.

(22:19)

The impact of people caring for kids. And so we can't talk about caregiving, it is just really being about parenting and then everybody else is on the side. You kind of have to look at this holistically, assume that it exists for everyone. It does not matter what they look like. It does not matter what their gender is, it does not matter what their background is, but assume that this is a need and assume that people's care situation is going to be one of the most stressful, challenging roles in their lives. And it is one of the greatest reasons you think about your home life versus your work life, your family. If your family and your work is in conflict, most people are going to choose their family. So if there is nothing else that you put forward, what is the one thing that could really help people emotionally remember, they are not going to remember your 401k plan.

(23:09)

they are not going to remember what match you gave them. they are going to remember whether you were there for them in the most challenging time in their life with the most important people in their lives. And so that's the opportunity. we are seeing a lot of leading employers like Eventbrite sees upon. And it is really having executives, I do not know how many of you know David, but he's a pretty visible vocal leader on the edge of up and coming HR efforts and really leading from the front, communicating what it is. it is important culturally, what you wanna accomplish, why you are living those values by the programs you are implementing, the way you are measuring that and working on other supporting initiatives together. That's really what pays the dividend. All right. So it is listening to employees, but also assuming that the need is just going to be there and making sure that you truly have that alignment, not just at the benefits level, but all the way up the chain.

David Hanrahan (24:09):

So well said. Thank you for the kind words. Well, I think that's our time.

Julia (24:15):

Yeah, thank you. Yeah.