The problem most People Ops leaders have with relying on traditional methods for LOA administration is that multiple processes and systems are often involved, and none of them work together. 

Your HRIS has important employee demographic data that’s required to build accurate leave plans, your leave tracker has specific leave data that has to be manually (and regularly) updated and securely stored, your insurance carrier’s platform lives an entirely separate orbit, and the state programs your employees apply for live in a different technological era altogether.  

Add to that the fact your payroll system has employee-specific payment details that require real-time leave information and your email inbox has a smattering of digital paper trails and folders trying to keep track of who said what when.

Keeping these separate systems working in harmony is vital for effective LOA support, but can make your team feel like those old-timey switchboard operators, frantically trying to keep process connectivity so the support signal isn’t lost.

Simplifying your leave processes into a transparent, simple-to-use, single-source-of-truth solution should:

• Talk with your HRIS 
• Build accurate leave plans for your employees
• Automatically track leave data (and updates with any changes), 
• Provides direct access to real-time pay details for payroll, 
• Guides employees through complicated STD and state benefits processes 
• Provide answers to employee questions as they arise
• Adapt to changes in a leave journey
• Securely store sensitive information 
• Creates a window into an employee’s leave so that People Ops, Payroll, the employee, and their manager have the transparency necessary for successful leave administration at a fraction of your teams’ bandwidth burden. 

Transparency in your LOA process frees your team to focus on all the other tasks they’re responsible for while empowering you to deliver a better experience for employees.

The federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) gives your employee the right to take 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave from work for medical or family obligations without jeopardizing their employment. An employee can take FMLA for: 

• The birth of a child and to care for the newborn child within one year of birth;
• The placement of a child for adoption or foster care and to care for the newly placed child within one year of placement;
• To care for a spouse, child, or parent who has a serious health condition; 
• A serious health condition that makes an employee unable to perform the essential functions of their job.

During FMLA leave, employer-paid health benefits remain the same. Your employee is also guaranteed a return to the same or comparable position in terms of pay, location, job content, and promotional opportunities.

As a manager, you can not ask your employee to disclose any medical information about their need for FMLA leave. Your employee is also NOT able to participate in any work activities and you should not contact your employee for work-related reasons.

We don’t need to sell you on the importance of employee experience. You wouldn’t be in People Operations if the employee experience wasn’t near and dear to your heart, but there is much debate and many philosophies around the best ways to achieve your employee experience goals.

A prevailing philosophy on this front requires focusing on the foundation of how employers are addressing employee well-being. There are countless reasons why an employee might need to take a leave of absence. Still, whether it’s welcoming a new member into the family or saying final goodbyes to one, odds are that your employee needs to take time away from work because a major, and very human, life event has occurred. 

These defining employee moments hold a tremendous amount of sway in the psyche of your employees, and if employees aren’t feeling supported properly throughout their journey it can turn those low grumbles into loud roars if antiquated processes aren’t modernized.

If you’re manually managing your LOAs, or likely providing your employees with:

• A level of service limited by inaccurate and outdated information 

• On-the-fly leave law information

• Antiquated technologies that siloes information

• Blindspots in workforce planning

• Uncertainty about pay

• Data security risks

• People Ops support with a bandwidth stretched far too thin

• A solution that doesn’t guide them with empathy or alleviate the many pain points they can face throughout a leave

The old way of managing leaves is more than just a thorn in your side, it’s setting the leave and your overall employee experience up for failure and can contribute to resentment in your employee population, 

Tilt Recap: Traditional methods of manually updating spreadsheets, coordinating across separate systems, and navigating confusing processes to manage LOAs puts a tremendous strain on People Ops’ bandwidth and can’t deliver the level of service required to provide a positive leave experience for employees.

While cultivating employee happiness often rests on the shoulders of those in People Ops, it requires a holistic approach with buy-in from everyone throughout an organization. We’d be remiss for even insinuating that higher salaries wouldn’t have a positive effect on employee happiness, but most organizations can’t just throw that kind of cash at the problem, and further the happiness boost tends to be temporary. 

Along those lines…

Don’t: Rely on surface-level frills

Employee happiness can be a tricky nut to crack because what makes one employee happy might not factor into another employee’s happiness whatsoever. Furthermore, surface-level frills can add some pizzazz and attract talent initially, but they don’t necessarily equate to a happier work culture and long-term retention.

Kombucha on tap? Ping pong tables in the breakroom? While most employees would agree that these are all nice perks to have, they won’t turn a sour work culture sweet on their own because it’s been shown that employees really feel valued when their employer cares about their well-being. Often, these are not tangible things but are scarce resources like time, energy and true support of their life outside of the office. Your employees won’t care about having nap pods if they do not feel valued as humans. 

Tilt Recap: Frills can be a component of a happy culture, but do not make a happy workforce.

Do: Focus on the foundational

Fortunately, there are foundational considerations that if properly addressed can do wonders to bring your employee happiness quotient skyward for the long haul without breaking the bank or your bandwidth. One such example of a foundational benefit that directly impacts employee happiness and customer satisfaction is the leave of absence process your employees experience when life happens and they need to step away from the office.

A leave of absence is a defining experience for your employees. Lance Haun from The Starr Conspiracy describes employee experience as “the perception of the quality of all the experiences at work, and our perceptions are driven by defining moments in that experience.”

In that light, a positive leave experience can strengthen an employee’s resolve to continue great work for your organization when they return. A poor experience, on the other hand, can have the opposite effect leading to turnover, potential fines, and work gap breakdowns. All of which can cause a negative ripple effect from organization-wide morale to failing to deliver on promises to your customers.

An arcade machine can’t paper over a poor defining experience for your employees. 

Tilt Recap: The foundational support of employees as humans is the building block to cultivating happy employees. How employees are supported during a leave of absence is a great example of this.

Do: Promote buy-in throughout the organization

Employees want more than human-centric benefits, they want the confidence to know that they are encouraged to take advantage of them. For example, at Tilt we use RTO (responsible time off), and we encourage its use by “leaving loudly.” If someone in leadership needs a mental health breather they announce it to the organization.

As Lorena Martinez, a former employee survey implementation consultant at Great Place to Work puts it:

“People look up to their bosses when they encourage their team to consistently take full advantage of benefits and wellness opportunities.”

Benefits need to be easy to access, accessible to all eligible employees, and be encouraged by leadership. Your employees need to trust that when they need one of the benefits provided they’ll get the support they need when they need it. 

Tilt Recap: Employees won’t feel confident they can use company benefits if there isn’t positive reinforcement to do so from leadership.

To reach the full potential of strategic workforce planning, Eq8 believes companies must move beyond headcount and incorporate a skills gap analysis, scenario planning, dynamic scenarios, and deeper comprehension of the employees’ skills.

Let’s focus on two of those items listed above; scenario planning and dynamic scenarios. Leaves of absence introduce workforce gaps that sometimes can, and sometimes can’t be planned for. And as Tilt’s COO Kait Feeney puts it, when it comes to leave of absence, “plan when you can for the expected and the unexpected.”

One leave of absence might be for a parental leave giving you plenty of time to workforce plan for the productivity gap. The next day you might have a caregiver leave request come across your inbox where there isn’t time to plan. The day after that, an employee might request a disability leave for an accident they suffered.

Leave scenarios are varied and thus unpredictable, but they’re also dynamic throughout the leave journey. For example, a caregiver leave may turn into a bereavement leave, or a parental leave starts earlier (or later) than anticipated, or an employee moves states mid-leave.

All of these scenarios (and there are countless instances where leave details change mid-leave) have a direct impact on your organization’s ability to fill in the gaps, keep employee burnout minimized, and deliver on promises to your clients.

Further, you’re charged with trying to administer leaves consistently to all employees, no matter the leave type, and no matter if the leave plan changes mid-course. Because of this, the traditional way of administering leaves of absence makes these scenarios a nightmare when it comes to workforce planning.

Legacy systems and processes simply lack visibility into the valuable insights needed to do workforce planning successfully. Either your leaves are being handled by an insurance carrier where important leave information stays siloed, an insufficient software that doesn’t remove any planning blindspots, or is done manually in-house where leave information is strewn across multiple files, folders, spreadsheets, and internal systems.

The consistency issues and clunkiness you experience relying on legacy systems for leave management creates a disconnect between People Ops, managers, and employees, and makes it nearly impossible to accurately and effectively manage workforce gaps caused by LOAs.