3 Biggest Challenges in Leave Management

Your HR department’s goal is to ensure employees are at their happiest and healthiest in the workplace. One of the most effective ways to achieve this goal is through a comprehensive leave management system.

As each company has a unique set of needs that its HR department handles, your leave management system must adapt to those needs.

For example, you may be surprised to discover your employees aren’t taking time off due to work-related stress. Then, as your stressed employees continue to take less time off, their productivity decreases.

In the end, issues like this one are important to understand before creating your leave management system. Otherwise, your HR department won’t be able to help employees when they need it properly.

To gain a better understanding of some of the top challenges in managing employee leave, review our list below to get started.

Top 3 Challenges in Leave Management

1. Communicating Leave Policy

First and foremost, communication is essential throughout your company. Without communication, many employees may be left in the dark on important company policies.

This is especially true when it comes to your leave policies. Ask yourself how your HR department currently shares policies with employees.

Does HR review important vacation policies with newly hired employees? Or are there additional meetings throughout the year to make sure everyone’s on the same page?

When making a successful leave management system, one goal should be avoiding the often costly result of miscommunication. Specifically, a 2013 survey showed that, on average, companies lost up to $62.4 million a year due to miscommunication.

So, having a clear communication process in your leave management system is necessary to avoid employee misunderstanding HR policies.

2. Tackling Absenteeism and Presenteeism

Another obstacle to overcome when managing employee leave is absenteeism and presenteeism. Overall, both absenteeism and presenteeism impact the workplace in different ways.

Typically, presenteeism refers to an employee who is at work despite being sick, ill, or otherwise. Additionally, presenteeism is fairly common even though it isn’t commonly discussed at work.

The causes for this can be stress over one’s workload or even lack of knowledge about how much off time an employee can have. An employee who

On the other hand, absenteeism is when an employee has a pattern of missing work. An employee’s work quality can often be a sign of absenteeism.

The causes for absenteeism can vary, from personal issues outside of work to an uncomfortable or even toxic work environment.

As both absenteeism and presenteeism can be hard to identify right away, your HR department should include various processes to check in with employees.

3. Understanding Vacation Pay

In the United States, there is no legal rule that an employer has to follow that requires they offer vacation time. Therefore, employers often have a lot of flexibility when providing time off.

For instance, many employers will often align with industry standards for paid-time-off. However, this method may not work for every company so that they can create flexible vacation schedules.

The ideal leave management system should take into account what unique benefits your employees have regarding time off. One way to achieve this is by ensuring your HR team has a consistent time tracking method.

HR staff can quickly check when an employee has taken time off. Plus, they can see what kind of leave an employee has taken, like paid-time-off, to pay an employee the right amount.

Conquer Leave Management Challenges With the Right HR Team

By and large, there are many solutions that the right employee leave management system can address. To help you create this structure, you need to find the right interim HR staff.

While starting the search for HR talent that aligns with your goals can be daunting, you won’t have to do this alone! By partnering with a company like Interim HR Consulting, you can quickly locate quality candidates with ease.

Perhaps you’re looking for an interim HR leader to guide your team in creating an absence management system or want to try out interim HR talent with a temp-to-perm hire.

In the end, there are many flexible HR services to consider with Interim HR to find the perfect talent for you.

To learn more about how Interim HR can help you find the right talent, contact their team of experts today!