It’s no secret that strategic workforce planning contributes directly to the long-term sustainability of your organization. By effectively and efficiently aligning your workforce capabilities with strategic goals your organization is empowered to foster a culture of continuous improvement and ensure the availability of the right talent when needed.
Another worst-kept secret is how difficult it is to actually workforce plan, and how the way many organizations try to accomplish it puts you at a disadvantage for success. Of course, if your workforce was predictable day in and day out, or year in and year out, workforce planning wouldn’t be the arduous task it is for most HR and People Ops teams.
As strategic workforce planning experts Eq8 points out, the lack of consistency is the primary roadblock to a successful workforce planning strategy. Only 52% of companies take an enterprise-wide approach, while 32% of companies only follow the strategy in some business units, and 8% of companies leave it up to individual business units. Furthermore, companies face challenges such as a lack of tools and technology.
On the People Ops pantheon of inconsistent processes that impact workforce planning is leave of absence management. Siloed systems, manual spreadsheet tracking, and a lack of collaboration with you, the employees you support, and their managers, lead to process inconsistencies and glaring blind spots in your ability to workforce plan effectively.
How Your LOA Process Impacts Workforce Planning
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.
How Dedicated Leave Software Removes Blindposts to Improve Workforce Planning
Just like leaves of absence and snowflakes, no two leave-of-absence software are the same, so it’s important to make sure you choose software that provides a consistent leave experience to employees while delivering transparency to key stakeholders tasked with keeping operations running smoothly.
The right dedicated leave software brings transparency into the leave of absence experience by removing data silos, syncing with your HRIS for real-time information, automating updates to leaves as they happen, should provide a crystal-clear window into all leave details.
This way People Ops and managers trying to navigate leave gaps have the most accurate, on-demand information on when their workforce will ebb and flow due to LOAs.
More granularly, an effective leave management software should provide a consistent and automated approach to your LOA process by providing:
Accurate Tracking and Reporting: Leave management software allows you to toss the manual spreadsheets in lieu of accurate, efficient, and automated tracking under one safe and secure digital roof. This data can be used for generating comprehensive reports on workforce availability during specific periods.
Real-time Visibility: By providing real-time information on upcoming leaves, dedicated software helps organizations anticipate and plan for potential gaps in workforce availability. This visibility allows better decision-making when assigning tasks or projects.
Integration with your HRIS: Integration with your HRIS means that leave software will ensure that data related to all leaves are synchronized across the organization. This integration minimizes the risk of discrepancies and enhances the accuracy of workforce planning.
Automation of Processes: As alluded to earlier, the automation of your leave administration processes reduces your administrative burden and ensures consistency in the application and approval of your leaves. This efficiency allows your team to focus on strategic workforce planning (or literally anything else you’d rather do than manage leaves manually).
Capacity Planning: By understanding the expected workforce capacity during leave periods whether they’re long or short, planned or unplanned, organizations have the information needed to make informed decisions about hiring temporary staff, redistributing tasks among existing employees, or adjusting project timelines.
Employee Engagement and Retention: Providing a transparent and supportive process for your employee leaves of absence has a strong effect on employee satisfaction and retention. High retention rates positively impact workforce stability and reduce the need for extensive workforce planning to address turnover. Conversely, low retention rates due to poor leave experiences would have the opposite effect on workforce planning.
Communication and Collaboration: Modern leave management software should also make communication easy, facilitating collaboration between your team, employees, and managers. Clear communication helps in managing expectations and ensures a smooth transition during leaves of absence.
Remove Workforce Planning Blind Spots With Modern LOA Software
Bringing transparency and collaboration into your LOA process requires a modern technological solution that not only supports you and your employees by making leave of absence easy but provides a single source of leave-data truth that can empower your organization to handle the uncertain seas of leave gaps with the insights needed to workforce plan effectively.
The removal of these blindspots reduces the likelihood of overworking employees trying to cover for their colleagues on leave and allows leadership to strategically workforce plan at scale no matter how many leave requests may pop up, or how many times the leave may change mid-journey.
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.
