Leave Management: The all-encompassing process where employees can request time away from work and the system by which supervisors grant or deny leave using the policies set forth by their company.
Leave management covers everything leave related these days. Vacation, Sick, Personal time as well as FMLA and Leave of Absence requests. Tracking employee absenteeism is even rolled into this topic.
Recently, I read how poor leave management practices negatively affect employee performance.
Poor practices include the old fashioned manual processes requiring the employee to approach their manager to request time off. Sometimes these conversations result in awkward conversations about why they want off (which is none of the manager’s business.) Of course, there is also the inconvenience factor of the manual process, where the employee has to carve time from their work day to make the request which may or may not result in earlier mentioned awkward conversations.
This employee benefit could be made so much more appealing by automating the process.
In a previous post, I reviewed how much I love my HCMtoGo App for Scissortail powered by UKG, formerly Kronos. I’m able to request leave from anywhere and at any time of day. It’s simply convenient for me and my manager gets an email notification of my request. Then, she is able to review the time off calendar for the entire team giving her the ability to quickly determine if my request should be approved or denied.
What was not addressed in the previous post was that the company handbook detailing the policies for Paid Time Off (Vacation, Sick, Personal) as well as other leave policies can also be housed in the Employee Self-Service (ESS) application. This gives the employee an opportunity to know the processes to follow and what to expect when requesting other types of leave such as FMLA or Leave of Absence.
In ESS, when an FMLA request is made, a notification can be sent to direct to Human Resources which can positively impact the employee’s experience with the company by speeding up the responses. If you want to get really fancy, a questionnaire can be generated to gather much of the required information from the employee cutting out even more wait time. As you can imagine, this is extremely important at a time that is already quite stressful for the employee.
These are just a few examples of how a leave management system can help the employee. I’ve not even touched on how ESS and a Leave Management System will help the company. But…as the story goes, “A happy employee is a productive employee.” And that’s quite important, don’t you think?
Let me know how you use your leave management system.
