Are you ready for the post-COVID vacation crush?
After a long year, employees are ready for vacation. Optimizing leave management ensures that productivity holds steady.
For many businesses, the past year has been marked by improvisation as they effectively transitioned to a remote work environment, adjusted to shifting consumer demands, and even modified their expected outcomes to accommodate on-the-ground realities.
Unfortunately, this tumultuous year has taken a toll on employees who often worked longer and harder while navigating less than optimal circumstances. As a result, many employees are exhausted. One survey found that 75% of employees report feeling burned out while reported instances of anxiety and depression continue to rise.
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In other words, they need a vacation. It’s estimated that more than one-third of employees haven’t taken a vacation in more than two years, while 92% canceled or postponed vacations during the pandemic, creating pent-up demand for time away from work.
That’s why, whether companies are managing newly remote teams or accommodating surging leave requests, now is the right time to reevaluate leave management practices. Otherwise, the improvisational ethos that defined the past year will shape leave management processes as well, eroding its effectiveness at a critical time.
As businesses emerge from the recent pandemic, here are five best practices for mastering leave management.
1. Make leave management a priority
It’s easy to overlook leave management as an operational priority because its function primarily impacts the employee, not the company. While businesses often focus their oversight efforts on compliance, company values, and employee morale, leaving the actual approval decisions to supervisors who don’t want to disappoint their subordinates.
Predictably, these results are atrocious. Productivity can wane when staffing standards fall below optimal levels, and managers failing to grant leave requests can undermine morale. This is especially true in a post-COVID environment where employees desperately need a break, but surging demand complicates approvals.
Managing leave with rigor is a win-win, benefiting employers and employees. This process starts by making it a top-down operational priority.
2. Avoid excessive rigidity
Thoughtful, even effective, leave management policies forged before the pandemic can feel out of touch for today’s workforce. Therefore, companies should reconsider their approach, avoiding excessive rigidity to meet the moment.
For example, unable to travel or even leave their homes, many workers had personal days or vacation time lapse in the past year. Businesses should consider extending those days, allowing employees to recoup that personal time on an extended timeline.
Similarly, many employees are equipped to work remotely, and companies will need to clarify expectations for remote work, leave requests, and flexible scheduling. Reforming policies that are flexible for this unique environment offers a dynamic solution that doesn’t require leadership to continually make exceptions to accommodate peoples’ needs.
Critically, leaders should communicate these changes, ensuring people understand the changes and interpret them as fair, reasonable, and necessary.
3. Automate leave management processes
Eliminate the side deals, and relieve managers of the responsibility to evaluate each person’s unique circumstances when assessing leave requests. Make an automated system the only system of record used for entering absence requests, receiving approval notifications, and monitoring balances and other leave-related information.
As companies increasingly embrace distributed teams, automated systems also ensure that one group doesn’t have better access to make leave requests or lobby for approval. Even before the pandemic, many remote workers felt left out of in-office opportunities, making it critical that companies level the playing field by providing equal access to absence request and approval processes. An automated system achieves this important outcome.
4 Require timesheets
Businesses are ready to rebound from the pandemic-influenced economic downturn, and they will need to balance this resurgence with leave management practices. That’s why, whether you automate leave to simplify the process or allow one-off arrangements to proliferate, timesheets are an essential tool for maintaining continuity.
When deployed effectively, timesheets ensure that business elements are adequately staffed, reducing the risk of losing money or disrupting company culture as employees cover for their colleagues.
5. Evaluate systems regularly
HR departments and managers should regularly evaluate their leave management systems, making adjustments to accommodate shifting regulatory requirements, real-time employee expectations, and flexible on-the-ground realities.
Thriving businesses are built and maintained by healthy, thriving employees. Personal and vacation days are a critical component of these teams, keeping workers refreshed and focused for the long haul. In this way, leave management is both a practical responsibility and an operational necessity that businesses should evaluate today and revisit routinely moving forward.
Alan Tyson serves as the CEO of DATABASICS, a best-in-class time and expense management solutions provider recognized by leading global organizations for its deep expertise, next-gen technology, and customer-focused platform.
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