Managing every employee leave request in your business is no easy task, but a leave management system can help you navigate leave policies, laws, and processes with ease.
However, only the best leave management systems with the right features will make the biggest impact in your organization. Whether you staff in-house, hybrid, or remote teams, the following leave management system features will keep you organized, efficient, and productive.
Auto-Populated Leave Calendars
A lackluster leave management policy will require payroll to monitor every leave taken by employees. They then have to calculate payouts correctly and make sure they aren’t overpaying or underpaying their team members, which could damage the business’s reputation.
Finding an annual leave management system that auto-populates staff leave calendars will minimize payroll mistakes. Since there will be no need for payroll to manually calculate leaves, HR can focus on tasks that need immediate attention, like onboarding or teambuilding.
All-in-One Cloud-Based Dashboard
Employees should have access to their leave balance at all times because it helps them plan for an upcoming vacation. Without an easy-to-use dashboard, employees have to guess whether they can take leave on a specific week and wait several days for managerial approval.
To better evaluate leave applications, a trusted HR employee needs access to vacation lists, workforce coverage, and department plans. A remote-friendly cloud-based platform allows your business to apply, approve, or reject leave requests at any time, from anywhere.
Individual Team Member Profiles
Your leave management systems should allow you to create a profile for each team member. Without this feature, HR still has to manually input who took the leave request, which would defeat the purpose of the software. Each team member should have their own log-in info.
By separating team members with different profiles, HR can also input various time-off agreements for each person. This reduces confusion when a team member wants to take a vacation/paid-time-off sick day or when HR wants to approve or reject a request.
Web-Based Attendance Tracking
Unplanned leaves can cost your business millions of dollars a year, but it can be difficult for management to track when or why they occur without a program. If there’s a common pattern in your workforce’s unplanned leave schedule, you need to nip the problem in the bud.
A good leave management solution can integrate with your online attendance software and send you notifications the minute an employee is sick or late. Employers can then cover for their employees or investigate a long string of absences without speaking directly with HR.
Intuitive Reporting and Data Analysis
If you want to get to the bottom of your unplanned leave problem, you would have to consult HR, compare hours worked to hours absent, and manually determine if they have any sick days left. That process can take a lot of time without tailored analytical reports from leave software.
Leave management systems make it easier for you to make decisions because you have auto-generated data at your fingertips. By using visuals like graphs or tables, you can find when your employees are more likely to call in sick, take vacations, be late, or go into overtime.
Flexibility and Customization
No two companies are identical, leading to different leave policies or regulations. Depending on your state, paid time off is either earned or not required. The state you live in can also determine the amount of paid time off you can earn, ranging from 8 days (California) to 2 days (D.C.).
Besides compliance measures, businesses should also be able to customize their leave types. For example, unpaid leave, sick days, paid time off, vacation days, and parental leave. You may also want to separate leave policies by business location or tailor your systems by industry.
