Leave Management/Attendance Management is one of the most vital aspects in workforce management. Leave/Absenteeism may occur in organization due to a wide variety of reasons. Ultimately this is an aspect that directly hits the organizational productivity and indirectly affects the bottom line, therefore the ROI.
Interesting Facts
According to a research, the average employee takes 1.25 unearned days off annually. This occurs in the absence of leave management tools. In this case, the research proves that this can be eliminated by using leave automation tools that help to track employees’ leave balances and avoid granting excess days off. Productivity is another benefit with leave management tools that helps to prevent manager’s time by eliminating leave-related discussions and record keeping.
The Key Challenge
The key factor that makes the leave management in organizations difficult is accuracy and cost effectiveness in administering leave requests because of the volume. Every employee makes multiple requests for his/her leaves annually including vacation, casual, sick and other such types. The complexity in calculating these types for each employee and keeping everything in a track is another key challenge for HR leaders, in turn the organizations. Another difficulty is leaves that are categorized based on designations, experience, roles, compensatory off and so on. Even with medical leave, there are two types-unpaid and paid.
An analysis done with some time & attendance and leave management application deployments has helped organizations determine and decide on valid cost-related aspects of automating your prime workforce management options. This primarily revolves around the managers. Some of the costs include:
Productivity: When managers manually calculate the team members’ time & attendance, especially leaves, it becomes a labor intensive process and also consumes a lot of their productive time, which when spent on their core activity, will help impact the ROI of the business organization.
Litigation: There are many variables which impact the given leave balance. With this scenario, manual calculations are always prone to errors. When and organization incorrectly denies a leave request, employees tend to respond with litigation or a grievance.
Excess compensation: When managers are unable to rely on automation for checking leave balances, there are 2 reasons for which excess leave compensation is being incurred. The first reason is because of the number of leave variables that are involved in calculation of leave balance; there are chances of errors in granting excess days off.According to a research, the average number of excess days off granted per employee in error is 1.25 days per year. The other reason is avoiding doing a task. When managers need to calculate leave balances manually, they are more likely to just grant and employee time off in order to avoid the litigation risk.
Scheduling: In cases of any leave-related absences, the manager needs to adjust work according to the schedules. This is to ensure adequate staffing levels. When managers do not check well before granting an excess time off, it creates additional scheduling work and this sometimes even incurs overtime costs.
Thus, the above said costs can be reduced with the help of leave management process automation. Also, this will ensure the business focus to increase on the core activities and not in such non-productive ones which can be easily managed with the help of technology advancements.
About The Author:
Stella Lauren is a HR Manager, who contributes useful and interesting posts on blogs about various workforce management issues. She suggests organizations to implement on-cloud applications for ADP -time & attendance management system.
