Transparency. We all value it, but we’re not always sure why and it’s often not very clear how to achieve it. The implications of transparency in the workplace vary greatly depending on what clarity is being sought after. Transparency around salaries, for example, can have a litany of ripples that an organization must be prepared to address.
When it comes to the leave of absence process, transparency implies a strong sense of cross-functional collaboration, clarity, and confidence that as an employee on leave my employer prioritizes my well-being. Beyond that, it instills trust that my employer is putting me in a position to have a successful and empathetically supported journey in my time of need.
A transparent leave process, of course, does much more than give your employees the warm fuzzies. The positive ripple effects it can have across your organization can be tremendous.
Transparency In Your Leave Process Boosts People Ops Productivity
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.
Transparency In Your Leave Process For Better Workforce Planning
Increasing the productivity of your People Ops team through a transparent LOA process would be a worthwhile boost if that was the only benefit to your organization it provided. Fortunately, that’s only the tip of the productivity iceberg.
When thinking about the ways a leave of absence impacts your organization it’s understandable to focus primarily on the employee needing leave and the resources your team has to allocate in order to effectively support that employee.
But an LOA also leaves a human-sized crater in your workforce that the employee’s manager must fill in order to keep his team on track for their own goals and objectives. If the employee’s manager isn’t in the loop throughout the leave journey they’re forced to workforce plan with their hands tied behind their back.
A lack of transparency negatively impacts an employee’s manager and the organization in a few ways.
Without transparency into real-time leave data: managers can’t effectively reallocate resources or hire temporary employees to fill gaps.
If managers can’t properly fill the productivity gaps: the remaining employees may feel overworked, and burnout and resentment can fester.
If burnout and resentment fester: employee engagement and productivity suffers, leading to dissatisfaction and employee turnover.
If employees aren’t productive: business objectives aren’t met and clients aren’t receiving from your organization what they’re promised.
The phrase “ripple effect” gets used quite often in the blogosphere, but in this instance, a lack of LOA process transparency can truly be detrimental to your organization’s productivity in the short AND long term.
Set your organization up for successful, transparent leaves, and keep your organization firing on all cylinders no matter if one LOA pops up on the horizon (like a parental leave) or if three appear out of the blue (say for bereavement, caregiver, or disability).
How to Make Your LOA Process More Transparent
Your LOA process can only be as transparent as the tools you have in place to facilitate your leaves of absence. Run an audit of your existing tools, platforms, spreadsheets, and systems that your team has to manage in order to support a single leave.
Are they working in harmony? Or is your team required to manually take data from one and put it into another (in the spirit of transparency we’ll save you a click and tell you it’s the exact same old-timey switchboard gif as above…it was just too relatable to use only once), relentlessly cross-checking for accuracy while communicating as frequently as possible to keep the impacted parties informed?
It may be possible to achieve some form of transparency using manual processes and outdated systems, but your odds of success are slim, your risks of inaccuracies great, and your anxiety over compliance risk well-founded.
Your best bet may be to refine your existing processes to squeeze as much transparency as possible at the expense of even more of your team’s bandwidth than they’re already providing.
Or your best bet may be to seek a dedicated leave management solution that can provide your org with transparency, your employees with easy-to-use leave support, and give a productivity boost that will be felt as much in your company’s culture as in its bottom line.
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.
