An effective way to manage employee leaves

The term “Leave management” means that employees request leave from work and supervisors grant or deny leave based on human resource policies in an organization. Managing leave is one of the simplest but critical HR activities, often taking up a significant part of the HR team’s time. Staff must ensure compliance with leave policies, the availability of sufficient staff at all times, and also to ensure employee satisfaction.

In a simple team, leave management is a process used to manage any leave requests and track absenteeism. If paid leave is offered as a benefit, the leave management system can calculate compensation for absent staff and record this information in the company’s HR records.

Why Leave management is important?

To be successful as a company, it is important to have a reliable leave management system. Research has shown that poor leave management practices can negatively impact employee performance. It can also affect employee morale and thus project results.

Ineffective leave management can harm the profit of a company

The leave management process is taking an important place in organizational policies simply because PTO (paid time off) makes a significant financial impact on a company’s profits. Employers are therefore always looking for effective, paperless solutions that reduce or eliminate the margin of error in calculating leave payments.

Ineffective leave management can harm productivity

Business leaders often underestimate the impact of absenteeism on employee productivity. Even if they are aware of the absenteeism, they do not understand how serious the situation is. People are one of the critical success factors of a company. Unauthorized absenteeism, lack of time and leave planning, reduction of productive times can cause damages to the overall efficiency of the company.

These are some common scenarios:

· Employees are not available at work because they are on vacation and the manager does not know this

· Cash register for extended leave without prior approval

· Delayed service when support technicians are on unplanned leaves

· Employees have taken more leave than they are entitled to

· The organization’s leave policy does not apply uniformly to all employees

This unexpected behavior by employees can be costly for any company as it can lead to missed deadlines, unmanned counters, poor customer service, late invoicing, cancellation of orders, unanswered targets, loss of goodwill, etc.

Implementing an effective leave management system supports the below factors for an organization;

1. Keeps track of leaves

2. Managing Leaves of employees

3. Reduce administrative burden

4. Enable informed decisions for drafting leave policies

5. Reduce costs

Automating leave management system

Complex and manually controlled leave management programs can be expensive and may not guarantee an error-free process. Thus, the automation of leave management is an immediate solution. Employees have access to self-service portals through which they can request leave and benefits. Managers can view and approve vacation requests in real time. The system will automatically track staff members’ leave requests and compare each request with staff members’ unused leave balances. The system will also track all requests for unused, approved an unauthorized leave from staff members and maintain records as necessary.

This contributes significantly to resource planning and the assessment of the impact of leave, on tasks that are already planned. Administrators/managers can thus make better decisions when it comes to staff leave. In addition, an automated leave management system allows employers to ensure fair and accurate compliance with the absenteeism policy. Leave requests and permit streams can also be customized to the business needs of the organization. Most importantly, managers can easily access the information collected for analysis, reporting and financial assessments.

We can conclude the benefits of using an automated effective leave management system as;

1. Excludes paperwork

2. Helps to improve communication between the hierarchy

3. Provides real-time visibility of data

4. Ensures compliance with legal regulations

5. Reflects the values of your organization