How to cut out the hassle with leave of absence requests

Any company with more than a handful of employees will know that managing leave of absences can be troublesome and time-consuming.

absence management

An automated online tool makes this process much easier. It enables good resource management decisions and saves that wasted time from manual handling.

Types of leave of absences

A leave of absence is when an employee asks an employer for a period of time away from work, whether with or without pay. It may be obtained for a variety of employee-requested reasons including sickness, family, earned vacations, or balance leave. In many companies, it is up to the employer’s discretion as to whether or not an employee’s request for an absence is approved.

Pains of managing absences

Often the person managing company staff leave have been doing their best with spreadsheets and emails or manual paper forms. The lack of transparent information with generally result in confusion for managers about their available resources. It makes them wonder – who is off today and until when? On the employees’ side there is confusion about the status of their requests – is it approved or not?

So, how to make this critical part of employee management less of a hassle? Here are some things to think about.

1. Make the process paper-free

The most important step your company can take to improve the efficiency of leave of absence request is to make the process paper-free. This saves printing, filing, and storage costs.

2. Ditch spreadsheet

Spreadsheet such as Excel is a great tool for ad hoc analysis. But, it is not designed for collaborative business processes such as the management of employee absences. One of the biggest dangers of using Excel is that is also prone to human errors. This usually means extra checking and corrections, and ultimately more hassle. To avoid all that, we recommend to ditch Excel and replace it to automated solution.

3. Choose your automated solution

A comprehensive automated solution should ensure all necessary steps in a workflow are completed correctly. This process starts from the absence request creation, through approval process, and finally the completion of the leave. It should also provide reminders when any steps are left undone.

At the initial request for absence it may be necessary, depending on the leave type, to check the employee’s available balance time or remaining vacation days. Supervisors must be notified when a leave of absence is requiring approval.  Also employees want to know as soon as it is approved (or possibly rejected) so they can continue to plan their life schedules. Finally important information necessary for correctly paying employees’ wages needs to be available for the HR personnel.

Automated solution saves your time

A suitable tool can reduce leave approval from an inefficient communication process over a few days to a matter of minutes. This means extra time for managers to focus on business growth and development.

To increase the chance of a quick approval, your employees will also be able to view a shared calendar showing when their colleagues’ availability before submitting their own leave request. No more back and forth email discussions of suitable dates.

Good historical data is also essential for predictions and benchmarks, which can have major impact on your business.

So, avoid short-staffing issues and reduce your HR and managers workload by acquiring automated leave of absence solution. But, bear in mind that the solution you choose is important for your business. We recommend a robust online leave management system like PlanMill. It’s an easy and straightforward tool for absence management and accessible through simple browser anywhere and anytime.

Bottom line

In summary, automated online absence and leave management solution eliminates expensive needless paperwork, reduces errors, and save corporate costs and time. It lets managers to concentrate on its core activities and tasks that have higher added value for the company.

More information is available in our Help.

PlanMill Ltd. is a leading provider of user-friendly web-based CRM, PROJECT and ERP Cloud solutions designed for the service business. We enable organizations to streamline business processes, improve control of their customers, personnel, projects and finance – while enhancing productivity and profitability.

Illustration: Vector Vectors by Vecteezy

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