What’s the simplest yet most crucial Human Resource(HR) process that takes up a significant amount of your HR department’s time? Leave management. A leave approval process is one of those things that seems simple on the outside, but actually takes a lot of time if you haven’t set up for it.
Once managers receive a leave request, they need to evaluate an employee’s eligibility, check for compliance with leave policies, ensure sufficient staffing for the day, and arrive on a decision that doesn’t impact employee satisfaction.
Given enough time, this should be straightforward. But, the real world is packed with last-minute sick calls and impromptu holiday requests. Just add in overflowing spreadsheets, multiple request channels, and a dash of manual intervention to the mix, and you’ll end up with a jumbled up process. How do you untangle it?
In today’s technological era, straightening out the knots in your employee leave management process doesn’t have to be time-intensive or a monstrous hassle. Modern HR management tools can help you remove the friction in the process and let it practically run itself with an inbuilt online leave management system.
What is an online leave management system?
An online leave management system is a web-based leave management application that automates every step of the employee leave management process without compromising on functionality. Unlike on-premise leave management tools, an online leave management system gives employees the freedom to apply, approve, reject, and manage leave requests from any place, any time, and from any device.
How Kissflow’s HR Cloud automates leave requests
If you’re new to automated leave management, the thought of moving it to an online leave management system may sound daunting. But, the truth is, businesses can digitize their leave management process on an HR Software in a relatively short span of time.
While there are several ready-to-use leave management apps available on the market, choosing a complete HR cloud like Kissflow will give businesses the power to automate your time-consuming HR processes and free up the time of HR managers, enabling them to focus on high-impact areas like culture, retention, and more.
Organizations like Orthosensor use Kissflow to streamline their leave management process. Kissflow’s HR Cloud helps businesses reduce emails, tone down the confusion, and maintain better leave records.
Here’s how organizations can customize Kissflow’s leave management module to meet their business needs.
1. Create a custom leave process
Kissflow HR Cloud has a predefined leave management module that is designed on industry standards. However, businesses can make it fit their unique needs by customizing it.
You can edit the leave request form, change data fields, auto-capture user credentials, enforce policies, set permissions, connect to databases, and do much more. Businesses have the freedom to make their leave management process extensive or simple based on their needs.
2. Configure the approval workflow
Once the leave request form is fine-tuned, you can create a unique leave management workflow. Make a one-step approval or create a longer workflow where the request is first approved by the manager, later reviewed by an HR staff, and finally passed on the payroll team for processing.
All stakeholders receive a notification (email or mobile) requesting them to quickly review and verify the data. The participants have the option to approve, send back, or comment on the request.
3. Configure a list of holidays
To stop wasting time on verifying an existing holiday, organizations can enter their holiday list and access it with the leave management module. Using this feature, you can create a list of approved holidays that are displayed to employees in a drop-down list. This removes any confusion about which holidays are approved and keeps everything in context.
4. Set deadlines and accessibility controls
You can customize deadlines to act on a step. The initial approval may need 48 hours to approve, but later processing can be done faster. At each step in the workflow, you can configure exactly what data is revealed. For example, the reason for leave may be an important data point between the requester and manager, but shouldn’t be shared with the finance team when it goes to processing.
5. Track available and used days left
To quicken decision making, you can display an employee’s leave history (used leaves, balance, overtime, etc.) right in your digital form. House your database inside the platform and it can automatically fetch the necessary leave information based on the unique employee identification field. After the leave is approved, or at any point in the workflow, the number is updated without any need for human involvement.
6. Create and export reports
Our built-in reporting engine creates interactive, visually-rich reports with the available leave information. You can easily create reports for employees or an organization-wide report to identify leave patterns and unlock data-driven insights. Once you create a report, it doesn’t have to remain within Kissflow’s online leave management system; you can export reports quickly.
7. Integrate with timesheets and other HR processes
To keep your online leave management system transparent and streamlined, you can connect Kissflow with your HR management software for payroll, timesheet data, and more. Through API integration, you can enable seamless data transfer across your HR applications.
With Kissflow HR Cloud’s seamless integration capabilities, you can prevent data silos, remove manual data reconciliation, reduce payroll errors, and keep the process consistent and transparent throughout.
Summary
Research’s reveal that a poor leave management process can cost organizations 20.9% to 22.1% of their payroll. Bad time-off practices don’t just affect employee performance and morale; it can also influence project deliverables. So, you need to take charge of your time-off process.
Rather than adopting a standalone leave management software, organizations can benefit more by implementing an all-in-one HR management system that comes with a built-in leave management module.
Kissflow’s HR Cloud has an array of HR specific modules including applicant tracking, performance management, timesheet manager, employee database, and more. Ready-to-use software solutions like Kissflow’s HR Cloud save management time, decrease payroll errors, eliminate human intervention, remove paperwork, and streamline HR management processes end-to-end.
Bid goodbye to email chains and move your leave management process to the cloud today. Get started today to see how Kissflow makes HR process management a breeze.
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