An employee attempting to request a leave almost always happens during a stressful, life-altering event. Think about it — even parental leaves, while typically a very happy time in your employee’s life, are still going to be a time filled with change and uncertainty. 

As an employer, taking great care of your employees is crucial to running a successful business. Ensuring employees feel heard, respected, and cared for has a long list of benefits, from increased productivity to higher job satisfaction, to a more positive experience for all. Although there are many aspects that can have an effect, employee leaves and accommodation are significant factors that are often overlooked.

When the leave process is complex, stressful, complicated and time consuming for employees, it can leave them feeling confused, under-valued, and unsupported, adding even more stress and uncertainty to their lives. This can ultimately lead to higher turnover rates.

Stressful leave processes can lead to employee turnover
According to Gartner, the pace of employee turnover is forecast to be 50–75% higher than companies have experienced previously, and the issue is compounded by it taking 18% longer to fill roles than pre-pandemic. And research by SHRM tells us that replacing an employee can cost up to 200% more than retaining them. 

There are a handful of things that typically go wrong with employee leave:

• Employees are confused about the different leaves and benefits available to them, including job protection and pay
• Employees often have no idea about the status of their leave request
• While employees are on leave employers don’t have the time to communicate with their employees which can leave employees wondering when they can return to work
• Employees question their leave status or eligibility, but there’s no single source of truth that employers can access (emails, Outlook reminders, even post-its notes!)
• Managers may not know when employees are returning to work, so access to the building and email, etc. may not be properly set up
• Employees may feel like they are letting their team or company down when taking leave

It’s worth digging into the negative so that we can avoid these issues as much as possible. Technology can help.

How technology can be a bridge to better employee leave processes and outcomes
Until the development of software solutions, leave management involved tracking requests and updates using hand-written notes, spreadsheets, and calendar reminders, or entirely outsourcing all of it and placing control out of your hands. Streamlining absences using technology is a wholly new management methodology, distinct from old processes. It sounds like a small thing, but it has enormous implications for easing leaves and increasing employee satisfaction, retention, recruitment, and productivity. Here’s how it can help:

• Hyper-personalization – The capability to personalize leave is more critical than ever. Frantic HR and leadership teams across the US are trying to update their benefits packages to better recruit and retain top talent in this competitive market. Employees want more visibility into their specific leave requests to understand if their leave was approved, which policies apply, and what those policies mean for them regarding benefits, pay, and job security. 

• Streamlining the process – There is a lot of information that must be captured within the request, and oftentimes case managers are frustrated and engulfed in more paperwork than they can handle. 

• Ensuring accuracy – With 130+ ever-changing leave laws across the United States, keeping up with compliance and making quick assessments and decisions when an employee requests leave, to put it mildly, is difficult. However, leave software’s ability to automatically calculate eligibility and generate a task list for compliance allows leave managers to move quickly and efficiently while leaving much more time to focus on the individual employee’s needs and concerns during their leave. 

• Self service – Providing employees with a self-service function (ESS) makes it much easier for them to request leave and gives them real-time visibility into the status of their case. In addition, all leave-related documentation and communication will be stored in one place, visible to both the company and employee. 

Managing leave has historically been a stressful, time-consuming, and complicated process for both leave managers and employees. But, it doesn’t need to be that way. By personalizing the leave experience, streamlining processes, operating on the most accurate and up-to-date case information utilizing dedicated leave functionality, as well as creating clear communication about case information, companies can now focus on creating a leave experience that leads with empathy and allows employees to return to work faster and happier.