Lets start with a quick self-rating on your organizations leave and time policies (e.g. sick leave, medical leave, time to be spent in office etc.). Rate them from 1 to 5 as per the levels below

  • Leave and Time policies are only on paper. What happens actually is very different,
  • Some of the policies are followed and it depends a lot on the managers and HR executives managing it.
  • Its followed, but very stressful to manually obtain data, process it, and calculate it, in time for the month end – leading to errors, delays and employee complaints
  • Some amount of automation helps us enforce the policies, but its not very employee friendly – requires running to your supervisor or HR to understand what goes on
  • We are on top of it. Employees can easily apply or know where they are, supervisors can easily approve and HR processes it automatically every period end. Exceptions are professionally cleared by supervisors and HR. Policies are employee friendly and improved for engagement and productivity

Leave and time policies are the boundaries that define the work environment in the form of tangible rules or policies e.g. We expect you to work 5 days a week for so many hours. Your break time is this. If you work extra you get this, or you don’t get this. If you work on a holiday you can compensate. It varies by country, industry and by organization and is often linked to laws and practices. Smart organizations maintain the balance between the carrot and the stick. If you work more you get benefits, but if you don’t you get penalized.

But a policy is only as good as its execution. Any time related policy like late, early or overtime requires time data to flow in. Exceptions need to be ironed out. The volume of data involved is very high and the time to sort out exceptions is short. A 100 person organization will have about 100 * 4 (in/out entries) * 22 (working days) = 8800 entries per month. Of these about 15% require intervention because they could be leave, could be late entry, early exit, missing punches, working on a holiday or such exceptions. The manual effort to sort these are very high, and as the employee count goes up, its almost impossible to solve without automation.

There is no alternative but to automate fully to reach level 5. Biometric devices, leave and attendance systems, employee portals and payroll systems need to work together as the foundation, and on this one needs to combine execution of the automated system. There are numerous leave and attendance systems available but very few combine all the capabilities of online/ mobile self service, biometric integration, exception handling and self service regularization and similar such practices. Even if they do, they are not able to handle diversity in policies across organizations

At KServeHRMS we have spent over a decade in perfecting all these areas, and delivering tangible results to customers, however diverse their policies are. It does not matter if you are Level 1 or Level 3 – we can take you straight to Level 5. We combine powerful out of the box product functionality, a flexible architecture, implementation tools and a methodology to transition you to the new environment.

For more information visit KServeHRMS.com