Leave management is one of the most important HR processes which consume a small but significant portion of managerial time. Although this does not take too much time, yet approving leaves is a delicate balancing act. On one hand, HR has to ensure compliance with leave policy and ensure availability of sufficient resources for business continuance, while on the other it has to improve employee satisfaction. Most of us have witnessed bitter manager-employee relation on issuing of leaves making leave management a strategic task for the organization.
Strategic Value of Leave
While many companies may not take leave management seriously, research shows that poor leave management has had a bad impact on business performance. It can impact project deliveries and employee morale negatively. Here are some critical business issues, directly related to leave management:
- Meeting project delivery deadlines: Availability of manpower directly impacts the project delivery schedules. While committing to delivery dates, managers need to keep in mind the availability of sufficient resources. They need to know the peak leave periods and should commit delivery dates accordingly. Also, when crucial projects are nearing deadlines, they should approve leaves prudently.
- Legal issues: Every country has legal rules for employee leaves. For instance, the Family and Medical Leave Act(FMLA) in the United States – with its broad definition of medical conditions and generous leave provisions – can scare employers, especially smaller companies who rely on a handful of key employees. Failing to comply with the complicated requirements of this law can result in serious liability for both companies and individuals. Similarly, in India THE FACTORIES ACT CHAPTER VIII, Annual Leave with Wages, lays clear guidelines for leaves. Non-compliance with these rules increases the risk of being sued by the employees and penalized by government authorities.
- Emotional factors: Getting leaves on time is a major employee satisfaction factor. Employees have several personal needs which require their absence from work. Read another of our post on denying leaves can cause emotional stress where we studied a case of mismanaged leave request.
- Financial implications : Accrued leaves are financial liabilities on organizations, especially paid and privileged leaves that need to be reimbursed at the time of separation or as and when required by employee according to the leave policy. If employees do not take enough leaves, the financial liability of the organization increases and the HR should report this to management at regular intervals.
- Performance vs. leaves: Work-life balance has a direct impact on an employee’s performance. Both, employees who do not take enough leaves (and suffer from stress) and employees who take too many leaves (and are careless towards job)have negative impact on their performance. Both types of employees need to be monitored carefully and coached on maintaining a productive work-life balance.
- a) Leave trends: Many employees tend to take leaves during the festive seasons. An HR manager should keep a watch on the times when a large number of employees apply for leave. These metrics help senior management in decision making especially regarding project delivery dates.
- b) Employee availability: This shows the number of employees available for work in the current quarter or at any given time period.
- c) Employee leave balance : This shows the remaining leaves of various types for the employees, both department and company wise. This helps the finance department estimate accrued leave liability of the company at a given time.
- d) Leave rejection : This show the number of leaves rejected by the manager in the last quarter / six months. Increasing number of rejections must be reviewed, as these may impact the employee’s morale.
- e) Leave acceptance : This shows the number of leaves approved by the managers in a given duration.
- f) Employees with “No leave in the quarter”: This gives the list of employees who have not taken any leave in the quarter. HR Managers should find out the probable reasons and even counsel employees, if they are putting themselves under stress.
Role of technology
Maintaining compliance or managing leave data can be difficult when done manually or by using excel . HR technology can significantly simplify leave management and add value by streamlining the organization’s leave data. Here are some key challenges that an automated leave management system can resolve:
- Accurate information: Provides accurate information about leave balances, leave trends etc. which allows you to forecast available resources at any point of time.
- Conveying policy rules: Uses in-built systems to convey leave policy rules like maximum / minimum number of days, holiday calendar management according to location etc. Employees can, at any time, refer to the leave policy before applying for vacation days.
- Compliance to leave policy: Often, lack of knowledge about organizational leave policies, lead to negligence of leave policy rules by employees and managers. A Leave Management System uses inherent rules that do not allow employees or managers to bypass rules while applying for or approving leaves.
- Instant information about employee’s leave history: Allows manager and HR to look at leave history of the applicant. Leave history for the department or company can also be extracted immediately.
- Saves time: Online leave balance visibility can remove a tremendous strain on HR where as much as 15% of their time is spent in handling queries on leave balance for employees.
- Improves discipline: Leave, when paired with attendance, can improve accuracy and build discipline in any organization. For instance some companies may have a policy of enforcing a leave without pay if an employee is absent from work without the manager’s permission.
- Multi-location holiday management: Leave when paired with location specific holiday calendars can help calculate the correct number of days that an employee applied for leave.
What next?
If you are an HR Manager, a CEO or a Line Manager who want to automate leave-related details, our consultants will be happy to discuss your leave management issues and guide you with appropriate solutions.
Feel free to contact and escalate your issues to our sales team.
A self-service portal at no cost
* No credit card required
I read this piece of writing completely on the topic of the resemblance of most up-to-date and preceding technologies,
it’s awesome article.
The information shared is extremely helpful! Thank you for sharing!
Nice and informative blog. Leave management software is very useful for organizations to manage their employee’s vacations digitally. Previously, we managed employee leave data manually because we had no choice, but now we can take advantage of technology.
Very Nice Blog. Thanks For Sharing This Article
Only desire to say your post is spectacular. The clearness as part of your put up is quickly remarkable and i can assume you happen to be an authority on this area. Properly together with your permission permit me to grab your rss feed to keep as much as date with succeeding put up. Thanks a million and please continue to keep up the superior do the job.
Very Nice Blog. Thanks For Sharing This Article
In any company, the staff needs to take time off every now and then. Without a tracking system, it’s extremely hard for organizations to stay compliant with the law and to regard nonattendance policies. A tool that allows to request time off and directors approve or deny absences it’s crucial.
Old fashioned attendance system includes manual entry of each student and staff attendance on files/papers. It’s also a time consuming process. Great post, Thank you for sharing this post.
Nowadays technology involvement in daily lives is increasing. The advanced software created by professionals is made especially for schools to utilize effectively. . It can easily maintain the financial activities and data storage, controlling and mining of all kinds of data of the whole school. Thank you for sharing this information.
Thanks for sharing such an informational blog which will, surely be a big help to the people who have small medium business
I found your article very informative and you had great use of facts throughout the article. Thanks for sharing this valuable information about Leave Management Software, it is really helpful article!
Very clear and helpful article. I am already using an employee management system DeskFlex and these insights helped me a lot to improve my strategies towards employee management. Thanks
thanks for sharing this.
I like how you mentioned the importance of meeting project delivery deadlines and how it impacts if it’s not done on time. I never had a complete understatement of online management solutions, and after reading this I know how convenient it is for your business. I will definitely have this in mind if I ever open my business and want a more efficient management process.
Dear this is help full to understand that the topic specialy the leagal point which you mention is very good.
outstanding tips and a great overview of leave management system. I got a lot of information from this post. Thank you for the fantastic blog.
Thanks for sharing knowledge about online leave management software, it was explained in a unique way and easy to understand.
Leave Management Systems are so much relief
Great tips and a good overview of leave management system for HR’s!
Thanks for sharing informative article and I appreciate it.
Really nice artical.it is very useful. Leave Management System is a need of business.
Just wish to say your article is as surprising. The clarity for your post is simply cool and that i could assume
you’re a professional on this subject. Let me clutch your RSS feed to keep up to date with impending post.
Thanks a million and please continue the gratifying work.
Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wished to say that I have truly enjoyed surfing around your blog posts. After all I will be subscribing to your rss feed and I hope you write again soon!
Very informative article.Now a days Online Leave Management System is a need of business.For a affordable,dynamic and user friendly Leave Management Software in India.
great jobs
Excellent article. I agree completely. Well done.
Yes it’s all aboout taking care of the people that run, or help you with your business. A happy helper is a productive helper.
Leaves are very important and considered as one of the best incentives a company can give. And I am talking about PAID leaves. Everyone deserves a break.
As an admin for numerous network marketing websites, I make it a point that my employees are given enough leaves as long as they are planned and are ahead of time.
Online leave management system is good but using software and hardware not only software.
I like what I found here here find something very interesting and certainly I will come here after I come from planned holiday
I just wanted to say that this website is realy good and Im Glad that i found it
I’ve gotten exposed to quite a lot of stuff here and just wanted to give my 3 cents. Im about to write a fine article for this forum about
and I’ll publish it as soon as i finish it.
If anybody need some help about it, please MSG me.
Thank you.
Indeed a good post wherein the benefits of implementing IT systems into HR Industry with technology has been explained. Implementation of
HR Software improves business efficiency which would help for increasing productivity.
I just wanted to say that this site is realy special and Im Glad that i found it
I’ve gotten exposed to quite a lot of stuff here and just wanted to give my 7 cents. I’m about to write a fine article for this forum about
and I’ll publish it as soon as i done it.
If anybody need some support about it, please message me.
Thank you.
I will note that lately our workers are generally having a hard time trying to learn all our policies so we ordered a software package to accomplish it for us. Things have been up hill since that time. Thank you for the fantastic article.
tq..
You sure got have a lot of knowledge about finance..I got a lot of info from this post.
.
I can learn a lot from this
you have a nice blog, i enjoyed the article.
As a Newbie, I am always searching online for articles that can help me. You blog reAlly helped me and I will be back soon. Thank you
A very relevant article.
In my discussions with many companies while implementing HCM solutions I have found that there is an error rate of 5% to 15% in leave management.
Assuming that we have 500 employees in the organization with 20 days of Paid Time Off. This is a staggering 10,000 days of leave that an organization gives to employees in one year.
At an average error rate of 10%, this translates to 1,000 days of errors in leave recording.
This is almost equal to 5 man-years of wrong recordings being done with major impact on payrolls & leave reimbursements as well.
We found that for every 100 employees there can be a saving of approximately 1 man-year of employee salary and is a very strong ROI for any organization which does not have an automated system of leave management.
Additionally we observed that a system of automated leave management coupled with Attendance Systems (sign-in register, swipe card, bio-metric etc.) that are tied to leave management reduces the error rate to less than 0.5%.