In order for Benefits Brokers to effectively grow relationships with clients the solutions you provide must be able to grow as their needs do. A lack of scalability is one of biggest frustrations People Ops professionals have with their tech stack because the greater the need for a tool to scale, the bigger the headaches it causes when it can’t.
There are three common unscalable leave management scenarios your clients might be dealing with, so let’s unpack what they are and how you can help them manage their leaves moving forward at any scale.
Scenario 1: Manual leave of absence processes
Manually managing leaves is the least scalable solution your clients may be dealing with, and you’d be surprised just how many of them are at the mercy of manual process madness. This can look different depending on the organization, of course, but oftentimes your clients are trying to track and update leave dates, pay, state benefit statuses and more in a tangled web of Excel spreadsheets for every leave of absence request that comes across their inbox.
Oftentimes they’re the only point of contact when questions arise from employees about their leave including the process to apply for State Benefits programs, changes that may occur during their leave (a maternity leave to a bereavement leave, for example) and where their pay is coming from.
Scenario 1 is a nightmare for your clients to deal with at any scale, but the burden can become unbearable as leave requests rise.
Scenario 2: Relying on Traditional Insurance Carriers
Your clients also might be relying on traditional insurance carriers to provide their leave of absence management support. The issue there, as we outline in more detail here, is that support they provide ends up being subpar because they don’t manage every aspect of the leave journey, and the aspects they do support aren’t effective or efficient because traditional carriers are not leave experts.
Leaves are complicated, and when an employee takes a leave they need an empathetic human who understands exactly what they’re going through and what they need to do. Dialing a 1-800 number and getting a new rep every time you have a question leaves employees feeling unsupported and confused. Furthermore, your clients have no window into what’s happening.
With traditional carriers leave information is siloed and spread across multiple systems (theirs and your clients’) where errors and omissions leave employees no choice but to go to HR and ask for help. Of course, your clients then have to take on the burden of navigating the confusion, which of course isn’t scalable as leave requests rise.
Scenario 3: A 3rd-party solution with automated filing
While the automated filing of forms seems like it would be scalable, really it’s not. The truth is that states do not have platforms that allow for benefits forms to be filed via tech, they have to be done by a human. This means that if a 3rd-party solution is responsible for filing the benefits forms for your clients’ employees, a human is still doing the work. That human doesn’t work for your client, and there’s no guarantee that they have the bandwidth to file the employee’s paperwork on time especially as leave requests scale upward with company growth.
Not only does this solution not scale, it’s also a compliance risk as both your client and the employee they’re trying to support don’t have a window into the benefits form filing process so errors and delays in submittals are at risk of going undetected which could impact coverage.
What does scalable a leave of absence management solution look like?
A scalable leave management solution, like Tilt, gives your clients a comprehensive management solution with total transparency throughout the leave journey. Tilt makes tracking, pay information, and personal employee information in one secure location, while guiding employees through every twist and turn a leave may bring through empathetic technology and real 1-1 human support.
Tilt empowers employees by making it simple and straightforward to apply for state benefits themselves knowing that the latest leave law information is baked into the tech. Your client might be able to field questions if one employee is on a leave, but even then they’re likely relying on Google leave law searches because People Operations professionals are not leave law experts. Tilt is.
If your client has an employee with a leave-related question, Tilt’s experts handle it compassionately with the help of our in-house leave law experts so your clients can focus less on frantic leave law Google searches and more on the work they love.
Quite simply, Tilt takes your clients’ least favorite to-do and does it for them….at scale.
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.
