When you’re a small business with a small workforce, it can be relatively easy to stay on top of employee leave requests. You may only have one or two employees on leave at a time, and you may not be covered by leave laws like the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which only kicks in when you have 50 or more employees.
But leave of absence management gets harder as your company grows. A single case can take as many as eight hours to process from start to finish.
Here’s how to use leave management software to streamline employee leave requests and develop a scalable leave management system for your HR team.
Scalable leave management is a system that can grow alongside your business and accommodate more cases as your workforce expands. Instead of placing more administrative burdens on your HR team or outsourcing the work to a third party, an automated leave management solution improves your efficiency.
A scalable system might include a self-service portal that employees can use to check their own leave balance and submit new leave requests or a custom rule engine that automatically assesses eligibility against existing labor laws and your company leave policies.
This functionality can reduce the workload per case from eight hours to only 15 minutes. But it doesn’t just save your HR team time and money; it also improves the employee experience and reduces the risk of human error during the approval process.
Manual processes work well until they don’t — and you may not realize just how much your existing leave management process is costing you. Here are three signs that it’s time to digitize the employee leave management with scalable solutions.
The more employees you have, the more leave requests you need to manage. Not only that, but each time-off request complicates staffing and workforce planning. If your HR team is getting overwhelmed with time-consuming tasks, it may be time to streamline your approval workflows with digital leave tracking.
As your business grows, you’ll be required to comply with more labor laws, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). In addition, many states are introducing or expanding leave laws of their own, which can be an extra burden if your employees engage in remote work across multiple jurisdictions.
If you can’t keep up with leave laws, use a leave management platform to track legal requirements and reduce the risk of non-compliance.
Manual leave processes are prone to error — a missing FMLA form, an extra day off that’s unaccounted for, etc. On a small scale, it may not affect your business, but as your company grows, these mistakes can add up. You may also notice patterns, such as excessive absences, that make you suspect FMLA abuse.
Cloud-based HR systems allow you to track employee time off more effectively than Excel spreadsheets and to ensure it’s in line with company policies.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms like Pulpstream are the ready-made solution when you outgrow your manual leave processes. These scalable leave management systems help you manage high leave volumes in-house with a user-friendly interface and integrations with other HR tools. Here are three key benefits.
Let’s face it: Manual leave processes are just plain inefficient. From carrying paperwork around the office for signatures to waiting for approvals from team members who are on vacation, manual leave management is an administrative burden.
With HR workflow automation, you can digitize paperwork and pre-fill online forms with employee data that you already have. Plus, you can integrate your entire HR stack to handle time tracking and payroll calculations automatically.
Depending on your company’s size and jurisdiction, your employees may have the right to sick leave, paid time off (PTO), and multiple other types of leave. Losing track of how much paid and unpaid leave an employee has accrued is just one way to run afoul of leave laws. You may also need to store confidential paperwork securely.
Digital leave management tools help you centralize your leave data and maintain a paper trail to ensure legal compliance and to track accruals accurately.
Employees increasingly expect a modern, user-friendly experience from onboarding to exit. Providing an employee self-service portal enables them to access their own leave records and take necessary actions. For example, Pulpstream sends email and SMS notifications when an employee’s leave request status is updated.
Ensuring employees have ready access to leave information assists with workforce management and reduces employee burnout.
Many leave management platforms offer similar features, but the right SaaS platform for you will depend on the size of your business and how quickly you expect to grow. Aside from pricing, here are the features to look for in a leave management solution.
Workflow automation is a type of business process automation (BPA) in which you use software to complete tasks that don’t need to be performed by hand. For example, when a leave administrator approves a leave request, they don’t need to personally send out an email or SMS notification — your leave of absence (LoA) platform can do it for you.
Workflow automation allows you to streamline and optimize your LoA processes so they require less manual effort, reducing your workload from hours to minutes.
Being able to view and analyze employee data at a glance is a key part of any scalable leave system. An Excel spreadsheet or calendar alone won’t provide you with the kind of insights you’ll get from a digital leave tracker with a real-time dashboard.
Pulpstream’s built-in dashboards make it easy to get a 360-degree view of each case with a single click. You can track intermittent leave, ADA accommodations, workers’ compensation, and more. Plus, you can identify patterns of chronic absenteeism.
Maintaining a paper trail is easier said than done. It takes effort to keep sufficient documentation of each LoA request while also complying with FMLA confidentiality rules and storing medical documents separate from other personnel files.
A scalable leave management system allows you to store documents and centralize communication in one place, so everything is there when you need it. Plus, you’ll have audit-ready logs of each action you took on an employee’s case, which can back up your decisions if you run into a legal dispute or compliance issue.
A manual leave management process might get the job done for now, but it takes time and effort that you can’t afford as your company grows. A scalable leave management process grows with you, reducing the administrative workload for your HR team. With workflow automation, built-in dashboards, and audit-ready logs, leave management platforms improve compliance, efficiency, and employee satisfaction.
Pulpstream’s cloud-based SaaS platform comes with all of the tools you need to scale your leave management process. From real-time dashboards to automatic email and SMS notifications, you can field employee leave requests efficiently and maintain a paper trail to demonstrate compliance with state and federal leave laws.
Pulpsteam can handle LoA requests from start to finish, including the return-to-work process. Contact us today to request a free demo!