In today’s fast-paced world, organizations now understand the value of data to drive performance and satisfaction. In the leave management space, there are many ways to set up your leave program, such as outsourcing, co-sourcing, or insourcing. One of the big benefits of choosing to insource your leave program and leverage leave management technology is access to comprehensive, real-time data. These critical insights can help you optimize your leave program and provide a much better experience for your leave team. In this blog, we will explore several ways that platform data can be used to boost your team’s satisfaction and performance.
Start with the right technology
In order to have a data-driven in-house leave and accommodations strategy, you’ll want to make sure you have the right software in place. Purpose-built leave management software can help leave managers do their job more effectively while proving the data you need to better manage your team. But keep in mind that not all leave management solutions are built the same. Make sure your leave solution allows you to:
- Create and customize dashboards
- Run customized reports
- Export reports
- Sharable reports with team members with one click
- Schedule reports
- Track accommodations data in addition to leaves of absence data
- Integrate bi-directionally with other HR systems, to make sure every system has up-to-date employee data
Outsourcing and co-sourcing often do not provide the level of insights and visibility that an insourced leave program can. Leave management software like AbsenceSoft streamlines and automates the administrative tasks, while centralizing all the case data in one location. This makes compliance with federal and state regulations simpler while providing easily accessible insights that can help you make informed decisions.
Identify key metrics
Accessing and managing data can get overwhelming, especially when you have access to so many data points. Taking the time to identify and track key leave team metrics can make your data analysis more effective. Sit down with your team as well as leaders within the company to define your team’s:
- Key Performance Indicators
- Ideal workload
- Other team satisfaction measurements, such as surveys
Once you have defined your key metrics, you’ll want look at ways to gather and analyze the relevant data with dashboards and reports. With a leave management platform like AbsenceSoft that offers a strong reporting and customization function, you’ll have everything you need to track and monitor your team’s KPIs, workload, efficiency, and more.
To learn more about how to incorporate key metrics into your inbound program, check out our guide: How to Build an Insourced Leave and Accommodations Program.
Monitor and measure team performance
Gaining insights into your leave program will help you monitor your team’s performance, but also see trends that could help you better distribute workloads, or perhaps have a team member specialize in a commonly-occurring but complex type of case.
Here are some reports that let you dig into your team’s performance:
- Real time leave status report
The leave status report helps teams avoid missing any critical steps in the leave process. The report gives teams an easy assessment of approval status and can pinpoint if someone is facing challenges in any step of the process. You can regularly review this report to ensure your team has the skills they need to process incoming leave requests quickly. - Caseload report
This report helps to identify if one team member is taking on a lot more cases than others, and lets you know you should consider distributing work more evenly. Moreover, this report lets you show executive leadership what your leave team has accomplished. It can display the number of cases managed by any given leave manager and can help to pinpoint if there are gaps in team staffing. - Case assignee report
The case assignee report will show you how many cases are assigned to each leave manager. You will also be able to show how many cases are open vs closed, when the cases were closed etc. This report provides insight into how your team is doing overall and can indicate if certain employees may need more assistance in completing their cases.
Use insights to boost team satisfaction
When looking at ways to monitor satisfaction, you can use surveys to ask employees how they are doing directly. But there are other data points that can help ensure that employees are not getting burned out. Reports from a leave management platform can let you know more about your team’s workload, and how this may be affecting their satisfaction.
Here are a few insights that can give you understanding of workloads:
- Number of cases overall
With leave software, you can quickly see how many cases your team is managing overall. You can identify trends that might mean you need more team members. You can also set benchmarks for how many average cases an employee can manage. - Number of cases per team member
This bit of data can easily let you identify an overloaded team member or two. If some employees have far more cases than others, management can instantly reassign cases and explore why this might be happening. - Case type
Each case type is different in complexity. Some cases will require far more attention and time than others. Identifying case type can help you portion out your team and allow for better organization based on case complexity. If someone has a lot of experience with CFRA (California Family Rights Act) cases, those cases can be automatically assigned to that employee.
Conclusion
Having easily accessible, real-time data gives you the insights to keep your leave team happy and high-performing. Data can drive better management, workload optimization, and help you identify trends in case complexity and volume. You’ll have a better handle overall on who’s doing what, who’s overloaded, and who might be struggling with a particular step in the leave process.
With instant access to the right leave program data, you can be the driver of employee retention, performance, and organizational success. To learn more about how leave management technology can help optimize your leave team, schedule a call with our experts at AbsenceSoft.