Articles and resources covering leave management, employee time and attendance, absence management and more.
There are plenty of software options available that streamline business operations, ensuring they’re functioning at a peak level of efficiency and productivity. One such software platform is an attendance management system. A lot of businesses still manage attendance and time off the old-fashioned way, and not only is it not productive. It can also lead to a lot of issues, confusion, and frustration. Read more ›
According to recent reports, more Americans are working remotely than ever before. A Gallup survey released in 2017 showed 43 percent of employed Americans said they spent at least some time working remotely. That was an increase of four percentage points since 2012.
The Gallup survey authors said they continue to find that flexible schedule opportunities and the ability to work-from-home play a significant role in an employees’ decision to take a job or to leave it. Employees are pushing for more employers to break out of the mold of traditional scheduling and work environments.
Employers see the benefits regarding productivity, and the ability to better deal with gender and skills gaps. Contrary to misconceptions, a lot of remote workers tend to work more than they did in the office.
Of course, not all industries are well suited to remote work. Among those industries, the ones that seem to be least equipped or open to remote work include retail, as well as education, healthcare, and manufacturing. That all makes sense, and the industries where there is the most time spent working remotely include finance, real estate, and insurance.
Since remote work is no longer something that’s rare, there are challenges and things to consider. One big area that a lot of employers are grappling with is how to handle scheduling.
The following are some tips and some ideas for businesses who want to find ways to manage scheduling for their remote workers.
General Scheduling
When employers embrace remote workers, they get the benefit of cutting overhead costs, having access to the most talented workers, and employees are happier which is great for retention. At the same time, they have to balance this with not seeing them every day.
For businesses with remote employees, it’s important to have time and attendance systems in place. When a company has a general scheduling system in place, it’s easier to then also keep track of things like sick time, and paid time off. If a business has remote employees or even employees who work from home one or two days a week, and they don’t have a scheduling system it can quickly become a mess for everyone.
What’s great about attendance software is that it doesn’t just keep track of who’s working and who’s not. It helps employee satisfaction because it lets remote employees easily tell their employer when they’re available and when they’re not.
Of course, with a scheduling system, you can also keep up with what you’ll need for completing payroll as well. You may determine that with your business and your employees, it doesn’t matter if people are working during set business hours.
What may be more important is that they’re putting in the necessary time and getting the work done, even if they’re doing it in the middle of the night versus the early morning. If this is something that works fine for a particular employee or the organization, you can still use time-tracking just to make sure their productivity level is where it should be, even if they’re not checking in at a specific time each morning.
Sick Policies
To alleviate confusion and frustration, when it comes to employees being sick, there needs to be a specific policy for remote work.
Employers need to outline when they expect employees to be working from home, and when they don’t. If an employee has the flu, they shouldn’t be working from home or otherwise. If they have a headache, they can probably work.
It’s really up to the employer to determine what their policy is when it comes to illness and remote work.
Some employers also create policies that allow employees to work from home specifically when they are ill to the point they could be contagious or shouldn’t come in, but when they’re not so sick that they’re bedridden. Again, if this is something that your business is looking into, make a policy and write it down.
While it is a great opportunity for employers, telecommuting can come with downsides. One such downside is the risk of people taking advantage to simply stay home from work, or not being productive if they’re working from home.
Use your attendance and leave management system to track patterns. For example, do you have an employee who always seems to be working remotely the day after a holiday weekend, or not checking in with the team? Having the right technology in place can help businesses prevent negative patterns, or at least identify them quickly.
Set Times Where Everyone Can Come Together
Certain positions do require being available at specific hours of the day. For example, if your remote employees are working in customer service, customers expect they’ll be available during traditional business hours.
However, for many positions, this just isn’t required. Your remote employees may start working at 4 a.m. so they can finish in the early afternoon. On the other hand, some remote employees may find they’re most creative and engaged during late night hours.
That may be fine, but you should try to include some face-to-face time where everyone can come together and check in at least once a week. Of course, depending on your location, face-to-face time might mean a video chat.
It doesn’t matter how it happens, but try to pull your entire team together for that set-in-stone, weekly scheduled meeting. This is the opportunity for everyone to share what they need to, ensure milestones are being met, and stay on the same page.
Finally, when scheduling remote employees, managing sick days, and providing them with paid time off, the most important thing to keep in mind is to set expectations. If you’re expecting your remote workers to be available even during their time off, you have to let them know (although this might not be the best expectation).
If you’re expecting remote employees to be readily available during set times of day, they need to know. They also need to know the number of hours you expect them to put in, what they should do if they are sick and are going to be unreachable, and how they should handle vacation and time-off requests.
As part of this, you should make sure remote workers are fully aware of and well-trained on their attendance policy, and what happens if expectations aren’t met.
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There’s a lot of talk about family-friendly workplace practices, but what’s the reality? Is it all just a trend or is there real business value when it comes to putting family-centric policies in place?
We’re several weeks into 2018, and a lot is going on in the business world. Some changes and trends are favoring employees with regard to everything from bonuses being paid, to new paid time off policies.
The following are some of the biggest trends to keep an eye on as it relates to employee benefits and time-off.
Expanding Family Leave and a New Tax Credit
There has been a big push for something to be done at the federal level when it comes to issues like maternity and paternity leave. While lawmakers are hesitant to jump in with national mandates, citing issues like differences between states and potential burdens on smaller organizations, a lot of businesses are doing it on their own. Even smaller businesses are moving toward increased family time off.
It’s becoming more common for new fathers to take paternity leave, and increasingly employers are also giving paid time off for things like adoption leave and surrogacy leave. Be sure to check out custom labels in CaptureLeave to help you manage all these different types of leaves.
Th tax act that was signed into law at the end of 2017 also offers a federal tax credit for employers providing paid family and medical leave to employees, starting this year. It is set to expire at the end of 2019, although that is likely to change. Many employers have shown that they are interested in taking advantage of the credit, and the hope among employers and employees seems to be that it becomes permanent through legislation in the future.
Technically called the Employer Credit for Paid Family and Medical Leave, stipulations include the following:
The primary stipulation for employers to be aware of is the fact that the employer has to have a written policy providing at least two weeks of paid family and medical leave, with wages being paid at no less than 50% of full-time wages and a prorated amount for part-time employers. These paid weeks can’t be offered as vacation, personal, medical or sick leave.
Flexible PTO Policies
More companies are starting to implement what are called flexible PTO. Flex PTO policies provide paid time off not divided into categories. For example, employees aren’t designating their paid time off as vacation, sick or personal.
Rather they have a type of savings account of PTO days that they can use as they choose. With flex PTO policies, approval from a supervisor is typically still required, but employees can do what they want with their time. Parents, as an example, tend to like this approach because they can do things like attend school events. It’s also easier for HR departments to manage time off under these types of policies, although they usually do still require a tracking system for things like caps and limits.
One trend that is still in its infancy is the idea of unlimited paid time off. There are a few companies, primarily tech companies, which offer this, but they’re finding it’s not necessarily as beneficial as they might have thought.
Often when employees are faced with no limitations to their paid time off, they don’t use it at all. Employers are having to find a balance between trends that are more liberal with PTO and encouraging employees to actually take advantage of the benefits and options available to them.
Financial Wellness Programs
Along with some shifts in how PTO is handled, a lot of businesses are implementing a new benefit for employees, which are programs that help them manage their finances.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management’s research, around 48% of surveyed businesses offer individual retirement planning as part of a benefits package, and 44% offer retirement preparation advice. Offering any kind of financial advice has also increased about 12% from five years ago.
Student Loan Assistance
Another big topic of discussion when it comes to employee benefits trends is student loan assistance. Some employers who want to attract and hold onto to top talent in their industry are offering loan repayment for employees.
Despite the growing interest, it’s still something that few companies are actually offering right now. Benefits experts say it could be difficult for this trend to catch out in a widespread way because it is expensive, and it has to be in line with the overall strategic objectives of a company. Two places where it does tend to work well are finance and technology, however.
Flexible Scheduling
Finally, there are different ways workplaces are approach what a schedule looks like. The concept of flexible scheduling isn’t new, but there are newer ideas such as the 9/80 schedule. The 9/80 schedule includes nine hours a day for the first week, and then nine hours for four days, that means an extra day off every other week. A lot of millennials find the idea of a compressed work week appealing.
Also, somewhat related to the idea of flexible scheduling is how gig employees are now being viewed. With more people opting to enjoy the flexibility of working as a freelancer or contractor, some employers are starting to offer them slimmed down versions of a benefits package.
While many of the benefits and PTO trends are most applicable to larger companies, smaller businesses are looking at ways they can embrace these ideas as well.
How do employee vacation trackers work in tandem with trending organizational processes?
The newest and greatest push in the world of human resources and executive management is unlimited vacation days. Of course it sounds amazing, but does it actually work? What does unlimited time off mean for productivity, employee satisfaction and wellbeing, and overall success of the organization?
One of HR’s most daunting and time-consuming processes includes handling vacation days, time off, and other types of leave such as medical or familial leave. Nearly 31% of surveyed employers outsource their leave-related tasks to third-party, leave management systems.
Leave management is extensive: approving or rejecting, filing leaves, counting up hours and time accrued. It becomes a stack of paperwork that no one in HR wants to do… and oftentimes no one gets around to it until it’s too late. Similarly, employees have to spend valuable working time filling out forms, submitting to HR, waiting for approval, and getting transferred here and there just to take a day off.
The easiest way to solve these HR related pain points is through convenient and comprehensive leave management systems that do the work for you! This is especially crucial for businesses with a lot of employees, but it equally saves time for small-business owners as well!
What are the features of leave management systems and how can they improve your HR’s efficiency?
Leave management systems often automatically follow each employee’s work hours individually. They can determine how many days an individual has accrued, how many days they have had off, and how many days they have left in a certain time span. This allows it to easily automate approvals and rejections based on the individual’s time off as well as the external dynamics of the company and organization.
It includes an employee vacation calendar that makes it easy to look at and manage all approvals and denials. Leave management systems also let you block out certain days that workers cannot take off time—such as Black Friday for retail stores or weekends in April during tax season for accountants. This ensures that no mistakes are made while approving time off during blackout days, whilst also enabling employees to take their appropriate days as needed.
Many learning management systems are web-based or have web-based products. In this way, your system can be accessed anywhere, from any device, at any time. This is especially useful for employees who want to request time off from their mobile or tablet.
Leave management systems often offer reports that show time-off balances, requests, automated approvals and denials, as well as employee and company-wide summaries. This simplifies expense reports and time and attendance management, leading to a more productive, efficient, and cost-effective company overall.
Benefits
All of these automated tools and reports together lead to six key benefits:
Overall, employees spend hours every year just filling out benefits and leave related paperwork. Simplify the process using simple, efficient technology that pulls the workload off your talent and into the web. Make the lives of your HR department, your employees, and the overall working environment of your company simpler by just adding comprehensive leave management systems to your HR toolbox.
