3D laser printing company Glowforge Innovates in HR too. Pro-active, increased support for LGBTQ families

Recently Glowforge, which makes 3D printers that operate like a Cri-cut for wood and other materials, created a way to financially support employees and their families getting abortion or gender-affirming medical care when the employee’s residential state laws doesn’t allow it. Dan Shapiro, co-founder and CEO of Glowforge, says it’s “the only decent thing we can do.”

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Glowforge has hired employees in states they hadn’t had employees in before. Shapiro says Glowforge made a promise to those employees to provide fair and equitable health care coverage. Texas’s Governor making their HR and legal teams work for two straight days to find a way to keep their employees safe was not appreciated.

Their policy, called “Flight to Safety”, will cover travel and relocation expenses when these specific types of medical care are not legal in the employee’s home state. The wording specifically uses “home state” because they’re aware that Texas is not the only state where health care restrictions are or will be put in place.

In a sense, Glowforge has etched their values into company policy like their three machine models can engrave materials. Also noteworthy is that they are sharing their work on this. In fact, they encourage people to “copy their homework”. Shapiro has invited anyone who wants the policy to implement in their company to email him at danshapiro@glowforge.com and he’ll share their HR innovation with you.

This is not the first time Glowforge has shared their inclusive health care policies. In 2015, they published the details of their health insurance plan and additional health services on their blog. Interestingly, they called out that one of the reasons for making them public was to help job candidates remove the need for “an uncomfortable conversation […] that could expose the job-seeker to questions” and worries about discrimination.

The remainder of this article has Trigger Warnings: reference to suicide.

This author’s additional considerations around Glowforge’s Flight to Safety HR policy.

• What’s covered is listed in multiple places in the document. I would change it to be in only one place in the document. That will make it easier to amend over time, especially without missing a place to update or creating a loophole in wording. It will also mean it’s easier for someone to understand what’s eligible. (Totally an engineer’s nit-pick.)
• “The abortion or gender-affirming care must be eligible for coverage under employee’s applicable medical insurance.” is the piece that risks making the policy useless. The employer picks which insurance plans are offered to employees. I believe work for open enrollment in Oct/Nov for 2023 coverage is already underway. Make sure that your health insurance plans don’t just have coverage of this care anywhere it is legal but that it is in the contract wording as a contractual obligation. These types of care should already be covered, so there is not an excuse for a rate increase on this change.
• The policy’s scope is travel and relocation for medical expenses, but not related medical cost differences. Going out-of-state for care also has a high probability of having out-of-network treatment costs. If you want to cover this differential, then save yourself a ton of overhead and privacy issues and say you’ll cover the differential between in-network and out-of-network OR all out-of-pocket costs for this medical care. All out-of-pocket costs means you don’t have to match up all the paperwork across provider/statement of benefits/invoices/etc. or know specific diagnosis or treatment occurring. You have a preference for whatever is easier paperwork(usually all out-of-pocket costs) but the employee’s preference is given priority. Alternatively, you could have your health plan provider put wording in the policy that all care under this umbrella is at in-network rates.

It shouldn’t be in the written policy, but encouraging relocations to states that don’t have and won’t get any anti-trans legislation would also be helpful for employees and their families facing these issues. There are 238 state legislative bills that are anti-LGBTQ this year. Most are transgender related. Most have been introduced in prior legislative years. Most of them come from the same template language. This election year Republican’s focus is on banning books and killing* trans people. Check and cross-reference against state maps of affirming and protective abortion laws, LGBTQ laws, and anti-LGBTQ laws and pending bills.

*Yes, killing trans people. Gender-affirming care is life-saving care, even if only, because it brings down the extremely high suicide risk for trans people.

Other questions HR departments need to be asking themselves

• Will child abuse allegations or criminal investigations against a parent/other targeted person be considered in hiring, promotion, raises, employment, “immoral” or related contract clauses, etc?
• If parents need to miss work for investigations, court cases, etc. will they need to take PTO for it?
• How do you provide parity for contract workers and employee workers?

Do you have an additional thought on these policies or way to reduce harm? Please comment here or email Glowforge’s co-founder and CEO.