Strategizing the leave management process is one of the crucial but cumbersome tasks any HR department of a company needs to do. It seems a simple procedure but takes a significant portion of their managerial time. Moreover, another challenge that HR managers come across while managing leaves is ensuring compliance with the company’s leave policy while keeping employee satisfaction in mind. According to a survey report by IPRJB, a strategic leave policy and provision for leave positively influences employee satisfaction.
However, things become challenging when you are only equipped with conventional tools for managing leaves, like paper forms, excel sheets, and emails. Even a tiny error in these tools can lead to several mishaps, such as resource crunch, payroll management errors, and legal issues.
That’s why most companies, especially SMBs, are thinking of revamping (or have already updated) their leave management system to avoid the hassle. Many of them are even thinking of outsourcing this task to external programs and services due to lack of resources, high complexity, compliance issues, etc. In fact, according to a report by DMEC, one in ten employers who participated in the survey and are currently managing the leaves internally are thinking of outsourcing it.
However, sometimes outsourcing leave management can also be disadvantageous when it comes to employee satisfaction or managing complicated leave issues of the employees. In that case, one of the best options you can have is upgrading your traditional leave management process to an online one to ensure hassle-free, fast, and satisfactory results.
This blog will discuss the top strategic benefits of opting for an online leave and attendance automation system and how it will help enhance the employer-employee relationship in a company.
How Online Leave Management Systems Get the Upper Hand Over the Traditional One?
As already discussed, managing leaves and maintaining compliance with the company’s leave policy becomes challenging when done manually or using spreadsheets. Moreover, when you have a massive pile of tasks over your head, the chances of errors become severe. In fact, according to a research paper published by a business professor, Raymond R. Panko, the probability of human error was around 18% to 40% when data is entered manually into a simple spreadsheet.
However, the same is not the case with online leave management software, as it streamlines the entire organizational leave data using advanced technology. Here are the potential benefits of using an online leave and attendance automation system:
- Accurate information: Since everything is stored, processed, and calculated automatically, there are negligible chances of getting errors regarding leave balance, leave trends, etc.
- Compliance to leave policy: A lack of knowledge regarding the company’s leave policy can lead to the breaching of leave policy rules by employees. However, an online leave management system utilizes inherent rules, due to which no employees are allowed to bypass them while applying for a leave.
- Instant information regarding leave history: With a streamlined record of all the employees and their leave history, an HR manager can easily extract all the leave-related information in no time.
- Saves time and effort: In a traditional leave management system, the HR staff must maintain paperwork or manually fill the spreadsheets to manage the employees’ leaves, which is intensely time-consuming. However, after introducing an online leave management solution, the process became smooth and quick, leading to saving time and effort.
Top Four Strategic Benefits of an Online Leave Management and Attendance Automation System
- All-in-one Dashboard
An online leave management system provides all the employees with an option to check their leave balance and view their co-workers’ days off before applying for a leave. Apart from employees, the supervisors, reporting managers, and HRs also have access to check this information to cross-verify and evaluate leave requests more comprehensively.
- Healthy Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance plays a crucial role in an employee’s performance level. Whether your company has employees who take too many leaves or those who do not take enough leaves, both will negatively influence individual and organizational growth. You should monitor both types of employees to maintain a high-yielding work-life balance. Moreover, it would help if you also offered enough time off to all the employees to get rid of organizational burnout. In fact, according to a report by SHRM, 93% of the employees believe that paid time off is a crucial contributor to their job satisfaction.
- Accurate Attendance Management
Online leave management and attendance automation system gives you an accurate and updated record of your employees’ attendance. Proper attendance management becomes highly critical in organizations where “buddy-punching” (clocking or logging in for another employee) is prevalent. According to a report by Workpuls (2019), buddy-punching can cost companies almost $373 million per year. However, having an automated attendance management system can effectively eliminate this scope. In fact, as per a study, 88% of the top-class companies have already automated their time and attendance submission process.
- Cloud-Based Technology
The best thing about having an online, cloud-based leave management system is getting on-the-go, multi-channel access to manage the leave data. Furthermore, it also prevents you from the hassle of installing, downloading, or updating your system to the latest version. With this, the employees can apply, cancel, approve, or reject a leave from anywhere, anytime.
Key Takeaway…
Leave, and attendance management is an integral part of core HR responsibilities. However, when performed manually, it can be an uphill task. To ease the process, companies are shifting towards advanced options, and that’s why online leave management solutions have become the need of the hour.
In order to eliminate paperwork, save leave management processing time and avoid payroll-related errors, you need an effective leave management and attendance automation system, like EmployWise for your company. By integrating a persuasive solution, your HR department can easily streamline the leave management process and reduce their overall time and effort.
