Navigating the leave management minefield without a leave management system is a tricky challenge. When you’re equipped only with conventional tools like paper forms, emails, and excel sheets, your chances of survival are pretty low. Even small missteps can cause disasters like resource crunch, payroll processing errors, and legal complications.
Despite the high impact on productivity and employee engagement, SMBs are not ready to revamp their awkward manual process of handling leave requests. At several SMBs, the employees are still running behind their managers with leave forms to get a signature. Whereas, the managers are scurrying around excel sheets to figure out leave balances.
Even the commonly-used Google forms lack the efficiency to handle some prominent leave management problems. All these incapable tools just eat away at the productivity and efficiency of your employees.
What good are your leave management softwares if they demand too much manual intervention to function properly? The distorted data obtained through these archaic tools is useless.
You can neither gather insight nor pinpoint problems from this cluttered mess without manual sorting. Even then, the accuracy is questionable. To stay clear of the administrative arsenic, legal landmines, and payroll pitfalls you need a robust leave management system. Before you start exploring the software marketplace for an ideal leave management software, you’ll need to understand the ins and outs of the leave management process.
What is leave management?
Leave management, also known as time-off management, refers to the systems and guidelines that oversee employees' requests for time away from work, including instances like vacations, public holidays, medical leave, and family-related absences.
Why leave management is important?
Although some employers want to keep employees at work all the time, they need their fair share of time-off to rest and recuperate. An overworked employee is an unproductive one. Leave management is the process of managing employee time-off requests in a fair, accurate, and efficient way.
The responsibility of handling employee vacation requests falls onto the shoulders of supervisors, HR staff, and workforce management staff.
Features of a Leave Management System
A Leave Management System(LMS) automates the leave request process, making it hassle-free for both the management and the employees. The solution of your choice should be robust enough to seamlessly handle all the stages involved in a leave management process: application, approval/rejection, filing leaves, managing leave balance, and analysis.
A good leave management system will have the following functionalities:
1. All-in-one Dashboard
Employees can view their leave balance and check their co-workers’ days-off while applying for leave. Supervisors and HR staff must have access to employee leave balance, holiday lists, department schedule, and workforce coverage to evaluate leave requests better.
2. Configurable Fields (Leave Type, Policy, Holiday List)
Policies and procedures vary from one organization to another. A stringent leave management system with ‘one size fits all mantra’ may not suit your needs. Look for a product that lets your staff customize the fields to fit your organization’s policies.
3. Cloud-Based
A cloud-based online leave management system will not only offer multi-channel, on-the-go access, but also remove hassles like software installations and updates. Your employees can apply, approve, or reject leave requests from anywhere at any time.
4. Auto-Update Leave Balance
Purchasing a leave management software is useless if your HR staff has to compute and update the leave balance of your employees manually. Your attendance management system must track the leave history of all employees and display it to both employees and their managers.
5. Customizable Approval Workflow
You must be able to create customizable workflows and set up a department-wise hierarchy to ensure a streamlined process. Once an employee selects his/her department, the pre-defined workflow must auto-populate.
6. Seamless Integration
Legacy software is archaic, outdated, and creates data silos. A product that offers seamless integration with your other HR Management Softwares for payroll, timesheet management, etc. will save time, eliminate silos, and enable cross-functional reporting.
7. At-a-Glance Reporting
Your product should include a built-in reporting module that creates interactive reports based on the acquired data. With employee-wise and company-wide reports, organizations can easily analyse patterns and acquire actionable insights.
