Like a good New England Clam Chowder or your stance on pronouncing “caramel,” consistency is key when administering your leave of absence benefits to employees, and for several reasons.
Off the top, it ensures fairness and equity among employees, which we can all agree is unambiguously important. By consistently applying your policies, employees can trust that they will be treated fairly among their colleagues, reducing potential conflicts and fostering a positive workplace culture.
Perhaps more importantly to your legal and compliance department, it helps ensure your organization stays compliant with labor laws and regulations. Mishandling leaves due to the inconsistent administering of your policies can result in legal issues and financial penalties if, for example, an employee has reason to believe there is preferential treatment afoot, intentional or otherwise.
Simply put, your consistency ensures adherence to legal requirements, safeguarding your organization’s reputation and financial stability.
Odds are you know why administering leaves consistently is important, and you also likely know it takes effort, copious amounts in fact. The sweet spot then is achieving that consistency without burdening you and your team beyond belief.
What Does Consistently Administering Leave Benefits Look Like?
Before we get into how to make consistently administered leave benefits simple (feel free to scroll down if you’re just dying to know…we won’t tell), it’s important to know what’s involved when we say “consistent.” Let’s break it down:
Policy clarity: A well-documented and accessible leave policy outlines the types of leaves available, eligibility criteria, notice requirements, and procedures for requesting and approving leaves.
Fair Application: Apply your policies uniformly across the organization, treating all employees equally regardless of their position, seniority, or personal relationships.
Effective communication: Communicate your leave policies and any updates to all employees, ensuring everyone is aware of their entitlements and responsibilities. Make your policies easy to access.
Timely Support: Promptly acknowledge leave requests and provide clear, timely responses to employees throughout their journey as questions arise or process clarity is requested. Don’t overlook facilitating a smooth return-to-work process.
Documentation: Detailed records of all leave requests, approvals, denials, and related correspondence must be maintained for legal compliance and audit purposes.
Consistency in Approvals: Evaluate leave requests consistently based on established criteria, such as medical certifications, without favoritism or bias.
Regulation Compliance: Ensure that all your organizational leave practices comply with up-to-date federal, state, and local labor laws.
Privacy: Maintain employee confidentiality throughout the leave process, respecting their privacy rights without exception.
That’s a tremendous amount of moving parts that need to be buttoned up and executed consistently, and most HR and People Ops teams simply don’t have the bandwidth or effective tools to achieve it. This typically leads to two common outcomes:
- Your team simply does the best it can and hopes no violations occur, or
- Your team adheres to high consistency and feels perpetually overwhelmed and understaffed to accomplish your other goals.
Fortunately, an easier way exists.
How Leave of Absence Software Makes Consistency Simple
Administrative frustrations born from consistently administering your leave of absence benefits are going the way of the dodo (why is the dodo always used as an example of extinction?…anyway). Modern technology solutions are alleviating leave of absence burdens and optimizing operational efficiencies like never before.
Tilt’s solution to leave management automates, streamlines, and standardizes the most complex to-dos that impact the consistent application of your policies.
When Tilt manages your leaves of absence, your policies are incorporated into our platform for consistent and fair application across all leave types across all states.
Tilt’s platform (take it for a spin if you’d like…)notifies all your employees of important deadlines and even sends reminders. Every employee gets the same treatment, specific to their particular leave scenario. This removes any instance of inconsistency when it comes to the level of communication and information your employees receive.
Our HRIS integrations allow us to automate your employee’s leave eligibility when they request a leave of absence to allow for a consistent approval process without you lifting a finger. With Tilt, timely support is never in question, and that extends beyond our technology. Every employee is paired with a real human (they still exist!) who will be their Leave Success Manager throughout their journey should any questions arise.
This means your employees receive consistent support from our team of Empathy Warriors so that you and your team are no longer bogged down by emails from employees asking you why the carrier is so frustrating to work with…Tilt handles employee inquiries for you and even works directly with your carriers. Consistent support for all employees is now easy to achieve, thanks to Tilt.
We also take privacy and security extremely seriously. Tilt is SOC II compliant, our platform is data encrypted, and we can even store sensitive documents directly in the platform.
Speaking of compliance, our team of in-house leave law experts ensures our platform consistently adheres to the latest federal, state, and local leave regulations. No more late-night leave law Google searches. We live and breathe leave laws here so you can rest easy knowing your employees are getting consistent support while reducing risks of legal intervention.
Consistent Leave Management Done For You
Take the guesswork and the grunt work out of administering your leave policies consistently with Tilt. Our solution is your operations cheat code when it comes to leave management. It’s seamless support for your people done consistently, while you focus your team’s time and energy on literally anything else.
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.
