The Impactful Top 7 Benefits of Embracing a Leave Management System

How an absence management system adds value?

When you consider how important time off is to managing employee burnout and achieving a healthy work-life balance, it makes sense to implement a leave management system that provides full visibility and accuracy.

If you are not able to follow up on employee absences effectively, it will not only lead to disruption in business operations, but also have a negative impact on the organization's bottom line. According to the CDC Foundation, lost productivity related to absenteeism costs employers $225.8 billion each year, or $1,685 per employee.

HR staff who have experienced having to keep track of employees' leave balances and accruals manually understand how important it is with automated solutions. By adopting modern employee absence management software instead of outdated paper or spreadsheet-based systems, you can achieve the following benefits:

1. Elimination of manual, paper-based processes

Absence management software automates the core functions of absence management and offers more functionality than spreadsheets and legacy time and attendance systems. Managers, employees and HR have access to a central portal for all time and attendance activities. Since requests for time off and reporting take place in the cloud, you can say goodbye to manual absence registration for good.

2. Monitoring of absences in real time

A leave management system gives you full access to all leave data, including accruals, leave balances and information about special cases, such as when employees borrow from future accrued leaves.

With real-time access to the employees' leave data, you can also see who is approaching the leave limit, and who has not taken any leave and may need encouragement to take time off. And with a full overview of which employees have planned time off in the future, you can take measures to arrange shift coverage and substitutes.

3. Compliance with statutory leave provisions and collective agreements

In order to manage your workforce, you need to keep track of both applicable leave laws and obligations under collective agreements. With a leave management system, you can manage the leaves of all employees, whether they are hourly or salaried, unionized and working under a collective agreement or working in multiple locations.

4. Adaptation of leave requests to the organisation's guidelines

With a robust system for leave management, you don't have to keep track of transfer rules and guidelines for leave exceptions manually. Instead, you can integrate leave policy requirements into your software. In this way, the managers do not have to worry about approving leave requests that fall outside the guidelines, and you do not have to wonder if the earnings are correct.

5. Automatic notifications for more efficient leave management

You can customize the notifications so that you are notified when employees submit leave requests, when requests are approved and when employees are approaching the leave limit. You can also configure the software to remind managers to take care of outstanding requests. Instead of requests being missed or left unanswered for too long, you can resolve requests and take quick action when there are exceptions that require immediate attention.

6. Improved capacity in personnel administration systems

With the help of seamless integrations with existing payroll, resource planning or HR management systems, you can ensure that leave data is synchronized with other important parts of HR management. Instead of performing manual salary calculations, for example, you can have your leave data automatically transferred to the payroll system, so that you get more accurate overviews for each pay period.

7. Better communication between managers and employees

When the employees have a user-friendly portal where they can request time off and see their balance, they don't have to find their manager to request time off. With tools for submitting leave requests and the ability to put requests on hold, managers get a stress-free process for handling future planned leave requests. Managers also have access to historical time off data for their team, so they can easily see who takes time off - and who doesn't. On the basis of this data, managers can have individual conversations with employees about how they can use free time and avoid burnout.

Implementing a robust leave management system like IceHrm not only streamlines administrative processes but also fosters a healthier work environment, ensuring compliance, efficiency, and improved communication between employees and management.