BLOG – HR OPTIMISATION

“1). How much leave do I have?”

For an employee, it can be frustrating not knowing how much leave has been accrued. Most people find the process of applying for leave a daunting and inconvenient exercise. An employee may go to the trouble of applying for leave, without having accrued enough, wasting their time and also the approver’s time. Trying to work out the amount of leave that might be accrued for a future holiday can become a mathematical challenge. It can make booking holidays and planning any personal event a difficult and time consuming task. One thing is for sure; people will be trying to work this out on company time.

2). Do you know who is abusing sick leave?

The traditional ‘sickie’, amounts to 90 million lost days every year and is costing Australian businesses over $34billion annually. Although an employee is entitled to take sick-leave, an employer should be aware of any trends in leave, such as employees consistently taking sick leave after public holidays, non-working days or after taking annual leave. Furthermore, all employers must have instant access to how much sick leave has been taken and what does this equate to in dollar sense? Being able to highlight employees that do not take sick leave is just as important, as it could highlight an area of concern for employees with ‘work-burnout’ resulting in stress and other related health issues.

3). What is your businesses leave liability?

For any SME, managing ‘cash-flow’ is one of the most important business challenges, yet they fail to manage ‘leave liability’. There are cases of many business that have long-serving employees that have accrued substantial balance of annual leave. So what is your businesses Leave Liability? Most businesses do not have this figure at hand and to try and work it out becomes a major challenge involving a number of business functions.

4). Managers rarely have peoples leave details accessible

Line managers may be oblivious to the leave booked in their department, leaving them unable to identify roster implications or plan accordingly. This then leads to huge amounts of wasted time sourcing this information.

5). Reviewing and approving leave requests is an untimely process

Productivity is greatly reduced due to the large amount of paperwork involved. If the required information is not easily accessible, it can take a long time for the approved or denied leave form to return to the employee.

6). The storage of leave forms and data can present many issues

Employers must consider the paper trail that traditional methods of leave requests create. Losing or misplacing leave forms can be a costly mistake.

7). Increased payroll errors due to undocumented leave transactions

If an accurate record of leave is not kept, there may be payroll mistakes between paid and unpaid leave.