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Attendance on Demand is based on three decades of experience in labor management technology.
Leave Management with Attendance on Demand
Automatically tracking employee leave cuts costs, streamlines operations
Summary: Leave management is the process of employees requesting time away from work and supervisors granting or denying leave based on its impact to the organization. Complex, manually administered leave programs are costly to manage, and often result in errors. This paper outlines how Attendance on Demand from Attendance on Demand, Inc. automates leave management policies to ensure organizations operate efficiently. Employers can fairly and accurately enforce leave policies, and customize routing and approvals based on a company's unique business processes. Most importantly, employers easily access consolidated time off information for analysis, reporting, and financial planning.
As today’s employee work schedules become more flexible, many employers now offer paid leave plans to employees as a way of combining personal time, vacation, holiday, floating holidays, and other paid leave. Leave policies are often based on seniority, job classification, or mandated by union or federal employee regulations.
Typically, an eligible employee receives a certain number of days of paid time off, which may be used at his or her discretion. Once the days have been used, any additional time off is taken without pay as stipulated by the organization.
Policies are often based on seniority, job classification, or mandated by union or federal employee regulations.
An Administrative Challenge
For many organizations, the success of a flexible paid leave program is dependent on whether the program is efficiently managed and accurately tracked.
When complex leave programs are administered manually, it is costly and cumbersome to monitor eligibility, leave requests, approvals, remaining leave balances, and enforce leave policies fairly and accurately. Manual methods are error-prone, and could result in leave abuses and costs related to absent staff.
With a manual system, supervisors are often unable to respond to leave requests in a timely manner due to complex eligibility and entitlement policies, which could result in unexcused absences.
Many employers fail to recognize how much of their total HR expense pertains to leave-related programs—and how much ability they have to manage these costs.
An Automated Approach
Given the financial resources committed to time off programs and the paper-intensive methods that surround those HR policies, many employers are evaluating their leave management processes to evaluate their efficiency.
The leave management capabilities provided by Attendance on Demand allow administrators to automatically track and manage a range of employee leave policies in real time. This process streamlines the various leave management tasks performed by supervisors, employees and administrators – including making requests, granting approvals, evaluating eligibility, scheduling, and reporting leave compensation. Invaluable summary data gives easy access to trends and employee leave patterns that can point to and help reduce the abuse of leave benefits.
Attendance on Demand provides accurate administration and tracking of paid and unpaid leave policies, applying complex rules fairly and consistently.
Leave Management Features for Employees
Attendance on Demand offers powerful capabilities to empower employees via the browser based Employee Self Service (ESS) module, which include:
- Real Time Leave Requests: With just a click of the mouse, employees instantly submit leave requests, and those requests are routed to the appropriate supervisors as stipulated by organization policies. Paper forms, informal requests, and inefficient manual methods are totally eliminated. Leave request status (approved, denied, or pending, for example) is displayed on the employee’s home page.
- Instant Access to Balances: Employees can view time earned, time taken and remaining balance for benefit hours (sick time, vacation, and so on) at their own convenience, without asking for HR assistance.
- Accurate Work Schedules: Employees benefit from having access to real-time work schedules that reflect granted leave. When a leave request is approved by a supervisor, regular schedules are automatically converted to absence planned schedules (scheduled sick time, for instance). When a leave request is denied, the employee’s schedule is not changed.
- Easy, Flexible Functions: A friendly user interface makes it easy for employees to learn how to request a partial day off, full day off, or a range of days – depending on the organization. Employees easily select whether to take off time at the beginning, end or middle of a shift.
Leave Management Features for Managers
With Attendance on Demand, supervisors can review requests in a timely manner, reduce the costly abuse of leave benefits and limit unauthorized usage; and keep current with employee leave balances. Benefits include:
- Real Time Processing: In an instant, supervisors approve or reject employee requests for time off as leave requests are made. Rules are fairly applied and employees are notified automatically as requests are processed. Supervisors view time earned, time taken and time remaining for each employee in real time. Managers can also instantly access an employee’s leave request history, departmental schedules during the requested time period, and other pending leave requests for accurate application of policies.
- Reduced Costs: Attendance on Demand automates leave policies, and eliminates cumbersome approval and record-keeping, which reduces administrative costs. In addition, on-leave compensation is more accurately applied, eliminating the potential for paid leave abuses.
- Information for Better Decision Making: Attendance on Demand helps decision makers identify leave abuse patterns and trends using detailed on-demand reports. Leave request folders supply statistical information about the number of employees scheduled to work and scheduled for absence. This information helps supervisors decide whether to approve or deny specific leave requests.
- Flexibility: Attendance on Demand manages FMLA, intermittent, and multiple leave benefits concurrently, and offers the flexibility to accommodate supervisor judgments. Leave rules can allow employees to request specific paid leave benefit, or let supervisors determine which benefit balance will support the leave request. Different leave requests rules can facilitate different groups of employees. For example, if salaried employees can take Sick, Personal, Floating Holidays, and Vacation days and hourly employees can take Leave and Floating Holidays, the system automates the different rules.
Conclusion
Many organizations are burdened by the tasks associated with complex leave management policies, including the completion and submission of leave application forms; approval/denial forms and other record keeping monitoring union and federal mandates. Attendance on Demand from Attendance on Demand, Inc. delivers powerful and easy-to-use Leave Management capabilities that reduce the total costs, both direct and indirect, of administering leave management policies. The advantages of improved leave management include lower total costs, streamlined operations, fair application of paid leave policies and a more productive workforce.