Leave management automation
Intro: ....it's simpler than you can imagine
It's long been known that paper-based systems are not the best way to handle employee leave requests, irrespective of the size of the organization. Even when the employee number is small, it makes sense to automate the process.
In a recent Aberdeen report, 60% of all organizations reported the need to improve automate certain tasks in order to drive more value into their workforce management practices. Unfortunately, despite the easily availability and the variety available with such tools (to suit every budget and business need), a majority of HR departments continue to rely on in-house systems and manual processes.
It's hard to keep track of every employee's presence on all working days. Even the employee may not accurately recall how much vacation and personal time they availed in a certain year. Without an integrated workforce management system, it's impossible to make a correct assessment of an employee's leave entitlement and encashment, if that applies.
There is an easier and smarter way
An automated leave management system overcomes all these hurdles. Research shows that the use of automated time, attendance, and scheduling solutions results in 8% to 20% lower replacement costs (as a percentage of annual pay) for hourly workers, which can be attributed to the reduced cost of administration needed to manually manage such functions. Aberdeen’s research also found that average revenue per full time employee increased four times in organizations with automated absence/leave management technology and two times for organizations with automated scheduling, time, and attendance technology. With an automated system staff & managers can access leave information at the click of the mouse, besides being able to:
Make these requests from anywhere, at any time
It introduces more transparency to the leave approval process.
Employees remain updated in real time on the status of their pending leave requests.
The management team is able to do better staff resource planning.
Control wages paid for staff over time.
Last but not the least, you could offer self-service capabilities for both employees and managers and make them feel part of the decision-making team.
For startups in particular, with limited resources leave management is a crucial task that cannot be left to chance factors or ad-hoc mechanisms, it's important to maintain accurate staff records. Such records of employees help you keep track of their diligence, experts contend. It also reveals the level of an employee's engagement with the job. Higher absence, lower interest. Consequently, greater the need to motivate your employees.
Companies can follow the following leave management best practices to make their people management processes more efficient:
Provide a flexible administrative framework. Choose a Leave Management system that can help you quickly configure eligibility, accrual, and entitlement to create suitable absence plans. It must also be able to re-assign tasks and allocate surplus resources to unmanned tasks, where the resource is presently absent, so that the workflow remains undisrupted. Choose a software system that promises you smart transactions and an employee-friendly, flexible interface.
Think globally; manage locally. A good leave management system would let you configure the user interface based on the local legislation, roles, and leave entitlement, as per the local laws. This would be particularly relevant in case of maternity and paternity leave entitlement.
Integrate with your payroll and time management systems. By extracting data from payroll, time and labor sheets, a good Leave Management system connects the dots to do accurate pay calculations. Employees can be allowed to self-manage the system with the help of a calendar/timecard based process. The idea is to gain total visibility into your time and leave management policies and how these are being applied, across all rungs of the organization.
