Step aside, Pythagoras. Einstein, not everything is about you (relatively speaking). The near-mythical solution for improved workforce planning, employee well-being, and organizational productivity doesn’t require long equations scrawled out on dusty chalkboards or a Ph.D. in astrophysics to unlock.
It simply takes leveraging automation technology for smarter leave-of-absence tracking.
It also requires parting ways with those leave tracking spreadsheets that for some of you are near and dear to your hearts, and for others are the absolute bane of your existence.
That’s because manual leave tracking not only takes up a tremendous amount of your time, it establishes blindspots in your organization’s ability to workforce plan, increases the likelihood of information being out of date or inaccurate, puts employee data at risk of exposure, and puts a handicap on your ability as a People Ops leader to deliver an easy and supported leave experience to your employees.
How Tilt & Rippling Automate Leave Tracking To Improve Workforce Planning
When you integrate your HRIS with LOA software, you gain access to a centralized hub to view all past, present, and upcoming leaves of absence across your workforce. Standout solutions, like the Rippling and Tilt integration, let you filter this data by employee, leave type, and duration, which helps teams keep track of absences and plan schedules accordingly. You can also incorporate leave statuses into reports and policies you set up through your HRIS. This kind of visibility ensures your workforce is adequately staffed year-round.
By automating your leave tracking with Tilt and Rippling, your workforce planning gets a boost in 4 ways.
1. Transparency into the leave process for HR, employees, and the employee’s manager creates a single source of truth for important leave information (such as leave start and stop dates and details about specific benefits and when they kick in or sunset) for all leaves across the organization.
With a transparent LOA process, employees can track their leave requests and don’t have to worry about following up with HR. They can rest assured knowing their pay will be uninterrupted where applicable and that they can access expert assistance when needed.
Transparency also helps ensure managers are clued in where need be so employees on LOAs can stay focused on what matters. An automated reminder two weeks ahead of an employee’s leave, for instance, ensures managers know how to adjust workloads so the employee won’t have any job responsibilities once time off kicks in.
2. Accuracy of leave data is vital. Leaves of absence can be paid or unpaid, compulsory or voluntary, and vary in length depending on a tangled web of different federal, state, and local requirements. Manually tracking it all in spreadsheets or over email back-and-forths drains time and exposes HR teams to errors.
You don’t want an employee in a state with paid family leave laws to miss a payment they’re owed while taking time off to care for a loved one, for instance. And if you’re a company with 50 or more employees, you want to ensure your employees have the mandatory 12 weeks off for excused absences under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).
With the Tilt and Rippling integration, your leave processes are synced to your HR data, payroll automatically adjusts based on leave type, duration, and any applicable laws. Once you specify what kind of leave an employee is taking, payroll updates to reflect whether said leave is paid or unpaid and how long it runs for—ensuring compliance with federal, state, and local leave policies and minimizing the risk of errors.
You can even automate how much of an employee’s salary you’re administering during paid leave. If someone takes disability, for instance, payroll can automatically adjust to lower compensation by 60%, knowing insurance will cover the remainder.
3. Leave trend analysis is made easy with Tilt. Within the HR dashboard, you can determine if leave requests are on the rise, and you can see upcoming leaves so your workforce planning efforts aren’t caught off guard (of course, some leaves are more spontaneous in nature)
Put on some cozy slippers and take a stroll through the HR dashboard yourself:
4. Budget and cost control are essential factors to consider with any leave of absence process. Leave tracking with Tilt and Rippling gives your organization the information needed to budget for temporary replacements or overtime costs during peaks in leave requests. These insights enhance your ability to minimize the impact that employee LOAs might otherwise have on your operations and budget.
By providing detailed information on employee leave patterns, you can strategically plan staffing levels to optimize productivity and mitigate the financial impact of employee absences. This proactive approach empowers your organization to maintain operational efficiency while staying within budgetary constraints, ultimately contributing to long-term financial stability and success.
"Employees should be able to fully unplug during leave and focus on what matters. With the Rippling and Tilt integration, customized plans are easy to follow, keeping the employee experience stress-free.”
Tilt & Rippling’s Leave Transparency Enhances Employee Well-Being
When a major life event happens in an employee’s life it can have them feeling like their world has been flipped upside down, put in a blender, then shot out of a cannon. Navigating their new normal (is it too soon to bring that phrase back?) outside of work takes a tremendous amount of their energy and, depending on the scenario, maybe some of the most stressful and confusing times of their lives.
A transparent LOA process ensures work isn’t adding to the stress of these often life-changing circumstances and enables employees to fully unplug.
From the initial leave request back to reintegration, the way in which their employer steps up and supports their journey can determine whether the leave experience is a positive, warm, and empathetic one, or a cold, confusing, and potentially resentful one.
The Tilt and Rippling integration provides total transparency into the leave process by laying out a clear step-by-step journey that takes out any confusion and brings simplicity to an otherwise complex process.
Here’s what those leave plans look like in the Tilt platform:
With automation built-in, any updates to an employee’s demographic data, say they move to a new state mid-leave or they need to revise their intermittent leave schedule, leave maps and dates are all automatically updated so HR and their manager are always in the know.
Your people have a lot on their plate if they’re going through a life event that requires a leave of absence, make leave be their furthest worry. While this blog is to talk about our automation capabilities, we’d be remiss to not mention Tilt’s humans who are there to provide 1-1 support for your people as well:
“My leave success manager Catrina and the Tilt team displayed the best combination of professionalism and compassion during a very difficult time for me. I felt supported during my time away and felt prepared for my return when time came.” - Frank Carlos Taylor, Customer Success Partner @ The Guarantors
For the colleagues left behind trying to fill in the gaps, the transparency provided helps them as well. With better insights into leave-related workforce gaps management can appropriately shift resources around (or hire temporary) to reduce burnout while continuing to achieve the organizational goals. More on that below
Better Leave Planning Leads Boosts Employee Productivity
As we’ve demonstrated above, a leave of absence experience plays a critical role in employee engagement across the organization. The business benefits of having engaged employees are numerous, with productivity seeing a 21% boost solely due to having high employee engagement.
At the end of the day, even if a leave of absence derails an employee’s life as they knew it, employers can’t allow it to derail their operations. Fortunately, smarter leave tracking begets smarter workforce planning for your organization, which begets a boost to employee well-being. which begets primo productivity.
Better leaves are foundational to organizational productivity.
By leveraging Tilt and Rippling’s automated leave tracking solution you not only can easily support your employees with empathy, but you can have them return engaged and seamlessly reintegrated into the fold to minimize potential disruptions of adding them back to the workforce.
You can also leverage temporary workers or use the leave as an opportunity to cross-train existing staff to keep operations running without a dip in production.
“If you want to have a successful leave experience, using temporary or part-time workers can work really well. It's a great way to build a pipeline of future FTEs and support the employee on leave, and also avoid the teammate gripes or resentment that may brew if others feel they've just inherited a whole bunch of work without any support. Cross Training employees can be a growth opportunity for others to gain new skills, see different sides of the business, and help out.”
An automated leave tracking solution creates clarity where there’s typically ambiguity around workforce planning due to a leave of absence.
Remove your siloed systems and let go of those spreadsheets you’ve been manually updating. The Tilt and Rippling combination is your simple-to-use formula for workforce planning, employee well-being, and productivity.
About Tilt
Tilt is leading the charge in all things leave of absence management through easy-to-use tech and human touch. Since 2017, our proprietary platform and Empathy Warriors have been helping customers make leave not suck by eliminating administrative burdens, keeping companies compliant, and providing a truly positive and supportive leave of absence experience for their people.
About Rippling
Rippling is the leading workforce management system, eliminating the friction from running a business by connecting people, processes, and systems. Rippling has every application that businesses need, from payroll to identity management and applicant tracking, giving every team the automation and insights it needs to accelerate business execution and run more efficiently. In short, Rippling frees smart people to work on hard problems.
