Making the Case: Using Leave Metrics to Influence Leadership Strategy

Making the Case: Using Leave Metrics to Influence Leadership Strategy

From navigating compliance risks to managing employee relations and everywhere in between, HR might wear more hats than any other business function.

As your responsibilities continue their inevitable creep outward, data is proving to play a more prominent role than ever before. It’s not just the collection of data that you’ll be faced with, but also knowing what to do with it.

Leave of absence data is one particular area in which HR has been driving blind for far too long.

Non-responsive spreadsheets with more tabs than a soda shelf from 1989 (Google it) might have a lot of data in them, but their accuracy and clarity render them mostly useless when it comes to gaining strategic insights.

Similarly, antiquated leave management systems (like via carriers) keep information siloed and inaccessible, making it nearly possible to glean actional insights.

By tapping into leave metrics from a more modern leave management software, however, you can deliver insights that refine policy design, strengthen employee trust, and enhance operational planning.

Today’s leave of absence management software can elevate your HR strategy, helping you turn data into actionable change. Let’s dig in to see how.

Forecasting and Planning with Leave Trends

After tracking leave data over a period of time, patterns emerge that are invaluable for forward planning. A dedicated leave management software can, for example, provide insights into the number of employees likely to take leave, seasonal trends, the frequency and average duration of different leave types, advanced notice to managers when an employee requests a leave, and the associated costs.

All of which equips HR leaders with the foresight to:

  • Set Accurate Budgets: With a clear picture of historical leave costs, you can forecast expenses for the upcoming year. This helps secure the necessary financial resources to support employees while avoiding unexpected budget overruns.
  • Prepare for Workforce Coverage: Knowing ahead of time when an employee plans to take a leave or upcoming seasons where you’ve historically seen an uptick in leaves enables better workforce planning. This ensures that critical roles remain covered, reducing disruptions to organizational goals.
  • Gauge Employee Sentiment: The lead time employees provide before going on leave can reveal their comfort level with the process. A shorter notice period might indicate a hesitation to communicate leave needs, pointing to potential gaps in trust or policy clarity. Similarly, identifying employee turnover from those returning from leave will let you know if your leave process is effective.

Using these trends, HR teams can craft data-backed strategies that leadership simply hasn’t had at their disposal before. Modern leave management software holds the key to balancing operational needs with employee support.

Demonstrating Compassion Through Policy Insights

Leave metrics are great for forecasting and planning, but they also provide a lens through which organizations can validate and refine their policies.

For example, consider the following hypothetical scenario that may or may not have actually happened (spoiler…it did):

An organization was offering 16 weeks of leave for major life events, supplemented by an additional four weeks for unforeseen compassionate circumstances. When new leadership stepped in they suspected policy misuse after observing some extended leaves, the HR manager turned to their leave data to:

  • Highlight Policy Intent: Metrics revealed that the additional leave addressed unique circumstances, such as medical emergencies or complex parental leave situations.
  • Validate Documentation: Employees had provided the required paperwork, confirming that they met the policy’s criteria and that the suspicion of misuse was unfounded.
  • Reinforce Organizational Values: By showing how the policy aligned with the company’s cultural commitment to compassion, HR strengthened leadership’s confidence in their existing leave strategy.

This data-driven approach transformed leadership’s initial skepticism into recognition of the policy’s value, demonstrating that well-implemented leave policies are extensions of organizational ethos.

Strengthening Leadership Decisions with Benchmarking

Benchmarking against industry standards adds another layer of credibility to leave metrics. By comparing your organization’s leave program with similar companies you can influence strategy in a major way.

Tilt’s 2025 Leave Benchmark Report offers tremendous insights into the ways in which different industries with different growth rates and different approaches to leave management (using a 3rd party solution of a spreadsheet) stack up against each other.

The results, which were compiled by surveying hundreds of HR leaders across industries and regions of the country, show that leave management software allowed for the administration of more policies, and that more policies with better support lead to higher retention rates, more employees hitting their OKRs and perhaps unsurprisingly, business growth.

Providing leadership with this context will help you in your quest to perpetually provide your employees with better and better leave strategies over time.

How to Select the Right Leave of Absence Management Software?

Now that it’s been established that leave can no longer reside as a back-office reactionary function, how do you know which solution is right for you?

With the right leave management solution, HR leaders can now harness the power of leave metrics to:

  • Shape policies that reflect organizational values
  • Influence leadership strategy with data-driven insights
  • Strengthen workforce planning and employee trust

But not all solutions are created equal. A tool that gives you data but provides a cold employee experience or exposes your organization to compliance risks probably isn’t worth the squeeze.

Tilt’s approach to leave management provides actionable, real-time leave data with an empathetic approach to leave that makes leave easy for all parties involved.

The platform provides HR with a holistic view into every leave across the organization, and managers and payroll get access to what they need to see as well. Further, employees are taken step by step through their personalized leave plan that Tilt creates, and even has a 1-1 Leave Success Manager to ensure that there is no uncertainty, even if the details of a leave change out of nowhere.

Tilt gives HR a scalable leave management solution with the metrics to influence leadership strategy all wrapped up in a secure platform and a beating heart to help every leave along the way.

As you build your leave management strategy, consider the transformative impact of integrating leave data into your leadership discussions. The result for using a solution like Tilt is a more resilient, compassionate, and well-aligned organization—one where every decision is rooted in operational excellence and employee care.

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.

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