Using automation in employee leave management

Samarth Keshava of Sparrow discusses how the company he co-founded is making employee leave management easier.

Samarth Keshava is the chief technology officer and co-founder of Sparrow, a company that automates employee leave management for organisations across a range of industries in the US and Canada.

Prior to co-founding Sparrow, Keshava spent 14 years at Google, where he worked his way from software engineer to engineering manager of the team responsible for the overall UI of the Google Search results page.

In his current role, he leads the product and engineering teams as well as working with fellow Sparrow co-founder and CEO Deborah Hanus to set long-term product strategies.

“One of my core beliefs is that success in this role can only happen by partnering closely with everyone around me.”

What are some of the biggest challenges you’re facing in the current IT landscape and how are you addressing them?

Employee leave is incredibly complex, and Sparrow serves as an abstraction layer over a large number of disparate systems (insurance companies, HR software systems, government agencies and more).

That means a big challenge we face is integrating with all of these systems so we can effectively build abstractions on top of it. This landscape is dizzyingly intricate. There are dozens of different players in every area. They have varying levels of software support for integrations, ranging from legacy systems to well-thought-out APIs to none at all.

There is no ‘magic bullet’ solution to make integrating across this challenging landscape easy. There are many services and tools that can help, and we use those whenever possible, but ultimately we just have to do the hard work, think of creative solutions when possible and make it happen.

What are your thoughts on digital transformation in a broad sense within your industry? How are you addressing it in your company?

When an employee needs to take leave, they are usually going through a major life event – a newborn baby, a sick family member, their own medical challenges or something else. Now imagine having to do your taxes at the same time, on paper, without an accountant or software, and if you make a mistake, you might not get paid on time or at all.

It was obvious that there needed to be a better way. It was also obvious that software could make this a much simpler and better experience. This is why we started Sparrow and we’ve been able to apply technology to make leave easy for both employees and HR teams.

Sustainability has become a key objective for businesses in recent years. What are your thoughts on how this can be addressed from an IT perspective?

What the ongoing tech transformation can enable is more efficiency, and generally speaking, more efficient processes should lead to more sustainable processes. In our corner of the world, that might look like fewer paper forms being used, and fewer forms being mailed around the country. But as the industry starts to apply these efficiencies more broadly to areas like how electric grids work, or to data centre cooling, the impact starts to add up quickly.

What big tech trends do you believe are changing the world and your industry specifically?

As more and more of the younger generations are entering the workforce, employee expectations for software and how they work are changing rapidly. Dealing with tons of paper forms or waiting on hold to talk to a government agency on the phone has always been painful, but may have been tolerated 20 years ago. I think that is no longer true. We are excited to be at the forefront of these trends and help to transform how people work.

What are your thoughts on how we can address the security challenges currently facing your industry?

It is all too easy to pay lip service to security in our industry. I like to call it ‘checkbox security’ – where you go through the motions of security best practices, buy a ton of security solutions that will ‘make you more secure’, and perform various rituals without actually meaningfully securing your systems and data. Like anything else, truly prioritising security requires buy-in and deep investment. For security in particular, your entire organisation from top to bottom has to truly buy in and put security front and centre.

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