When you think through your organization’s approach to leave management, you can probably identify a couple of opportunities for business process optimization. Your team may experience a lot of miscommunications. Paperwork may fall through the cracks.
Whatever mishaps or frustrations you face, business process optimization can help. In this article, we will define business process optimization, explore its benefits, and show you how to apply it in the leave management process.
What Is Business Process Optimization?
Business process optimization, or BPO, is as straightforward as it sounds. It’s an intentional effort to improve a process within a business function. This improvement isn’t aimless. When a team embarks on business process optimization, it’s working toward a specific goal. That goal could be efficiency, ease, or any other kind of improvement.
Business process optimization is related to but distinct from exercises like process mapping and workflow automation. Optimizing business processes may include some of those exercises, but it moves beyond analyzing and improving to achieve a specific outcome.
It’s important to acknowledge that business process optimization is often associated with frameworks like Six Sigma or Lean. Rather than focusing on a specific methodology, this article explores BPO as a framework you can use to streamline operations within your organization’s leave and accommodations program.
Why Leave and Accommodations Is a Textbook BPO Candidate
Your leave and accommodations program is an excellent use case for business process optimization. Here’s why:
- It’s high volume. According to AbsenceSoft research, the majority of HR leaders have reported increases in both leave and accommodations requests for three years in a row. That means that every process responsible for administering leave and accommodations needs to operate successfully at scale. When hundreds or thousands of employees need support, your processes have to keep up. By increasing efficiency, BPO can drive improvement in existing processes.
- It involves multiple stakeholders. Your organization’s leave and accommodations program impacts many different people, from employees and managers to HR and leadership. A process that touches every person in your company deserves your attention. When you improve processes with broad impact, relief will be felt widely.
- It’s complex. Leave and accommodations management is governed by federal laws like the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, in addition to more than 200 state statutes. Reducing process-related errors through BPO is imperative.
Your organization’s leave and accommodations program is full of processes. With BPO, you can ensure those processes are smooth, timely, and compliant, even when they’re facilitating more requests than ever before.
How To Optimize Leave And Accommodations, Step By Step
When you apply BPO to leave and accommodations, you can spot bottlenecks, prevent compliance errors, reduce costs, and improve the employee experience. Below, we lay out a step-by-step guide that shows you how to optimize your organization’s leave and accommodations program.
Step 1: Identify The Inefficiencies
Delays and bottlenecks can creep into the leave and accommodations process at any point. Most of the time, inefficiencies are merely frustrating. But missed deadlines or significant delays can constitute compliance violations under certain laws.
That’s why it’s crucial to begin the optimization process by identifying inefficiencies. Examine your leave and accommodations program from end to end, noting where the most significant and risky bottlenecks occur.
Here are the most common delays that occur throughout the leave and accommodations process:
Intake: For the vast majority of organizations, intake is a mess. AbsenceSoft data shows that 92% of requests still arrive by email, phone, or word of mouth. Only 8% of requests come through a designated self-service portal. When intake is disorderly, delays are inevitable. An email or Slack message may go unread. A missed phone call could be forgotten. These simple mistakes create frustration for employees and can derail support from the very beginning.
Eligibility: It can be incredibly challenging to determine someone’s eligibility for leave and accommodations: eligibility varies by state, employer, and leave type. A recent AbsenceSoft report found that 41% of HR leaders rated FMLA compliance and eligibility alone as a top challenge. When it comes to eligibility, inefficiencies can look like lengthy calculation time, confusion, and mistakes.
Paperwork: It’s no surprise that paperwork is a pain point for HR and managers. But it’s a frustration for employees, too. Nearly 50% of employees reported struggling with required documentation in an AbsenceSoft survey. Employees complained about repetitive busywork and confusing requirements. They also flagged HR’s tendency to lose completed paperwork.
Intermittent leave: When employees take leave in small increments, it can be tricky to track their time away accurately. It’s no wonder, then, that 42% of HR leaders said managing intermittent leave and reduced schedules is a top challenge. When HR attempts to track intermittent leave manually, they may make recording errors that give employees too much or too little leave. Either situation is costly.
Managers: Your organization’s mid-level leaders are on the frontlines of leave and accommodation. But many of them haven’t received the training they need. Nearly a third of organizations provide managers with no leave and accommodations training whatsoever, according to AbsenceSoft data. Untrained managers can create all kinds of problems, from denying someone their rightful support to sharing confidential information inappropriately.
Return to work: Many employers forget about the return to work process, as evidenced by the 81% of employees who said they were not asked whether they needed an accommodation when they came back to the office. This oversight can have major implications for engagement and productivity. Employees returning from leave often need an accommodation as they transition back to the workplace. Without the support they need, they may have a difficult time resuming their duties. They may even experience a setback with their health as they attempt to get back to work.
Step 2: Redesign The Process
After you’ve identified the inefficiencies in your existing processes, it’s time to take those systems back to the drawing board. Optimization starts with redesign. Strategize how you can transform each element of your leave management program so that it’s as streamlined as possible. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Intake: Strong intake is all about defined but limited options. Give employees a clear starting point so they know where to begin. Self-service tools help. With an online portal, employees can submit and track requests without the help of a manager or HR. Collect the same information, the same way, every single time. When an employee comes to a manager with a request, train them to point employees to this process.
Eligibility: To ensure your eligibility calculations are accurate, you need a verified, up-to-date source for leave laws. Don’t rely on Google or ChatGPT to tell you who’s eligible for the FMLA or a state leave law. Use cheat sheets and flyers from the government to help educate employees on their rights. As for technology, it’s best practice to connect employee data directly to your eligibility calculations. Integrating employee data prevents key information from falling through the cracks.
Paperwork: Where possible, keep paperwork contained in one channel. Tell employees and managers to hand in their paperwork within that channel, rather than using alternate methods. When giving paperwork to employees, make sure they understand their homework. Keep communications clear and short. Provide specific deadlines and step-by-step instructions to prevent missing information.
Intermittent leave: Use a single system of record to track intermittent leave usage in real time. To get a consistent view of every case, centralize reporting. Work with employees to plan intermittent leave around their schedule whenever possible.
Managers: Offer manager training as often as possible. Leave laws change all the time, which means managers need regular refreshers to stay up to date. It’s also important to keep managers informed throughout the leave process. Self-service tools help with this effort, as they keep employees, managers, and HR on the same page.
Return to work: When the situation allows, begin return-to-work planning before an employee goes on leave. Structured conversations about restrictions, changes, or accommodations ensure employees have the support they need when they come back to the workplace. Shortly after their return, check in with the employee to make sure their transition is going well.
Step 3: Automate What You Have Redesigned
When you redesign leave management processes, you streamline and centralize tasks that were once inefficient and disorganized. While critical to your BPO process, the redesign phase is futile if the ideas it produced aren’t implemented and supported by technology.
The next step of optimizing your leave management program focuses on automation. With the right kind of automated technology, your team will reduce costs, all while increasing efficiency and reducing errors.
Here’s how automation can enable your redesigned leave processes:
Intake: A self-service portal powered by automation will prompt employees requesting a leave of absence or accommodation to enter every piece of information HR needs, reducing administrative burden and delays. Each completed request triggers the creation of a new case, which is opened in a centralized platform.
Eligibility: With an automation-backed compliance engine, your team can have instantaneous eligibility and entitlement calculations. Integrations with your HR systems will ensure decisions are based on accurate and current data.
Paperwork: A leave management platform can use automation to automatically send communications to employees through email and text throughout the leave process. The platform can instantly attach forms to pre-generated communications based on employee eligibility and entitlement. Incoming faxed medical forms are also stored automatically, attached to the proper case.
Intermittent leave: Automation takes the guesswork out of tracking. With the right platform, every minute of an employee’s leave is automatically tracked and decremented as their time away is requested and approved.
Return to work: Automation paves the way for a return-to-work transition that feels effortless. Scheduled notifications via text and email remind IT, managers, building managers, and other stakeholders of an employee’s upcoming arrival. A leave management platform can automatically generate forms and medical certifications, which employees and medical providers can complete and return digitally.
Automation is key to modernizing leave management. What used to be a clunky, burdensome headache is now a fast-moving process, when it’s supported by the right technology.
Artificial intelligence is also making its way into the leave management process. AI is helping HR draft employee communications, analyze internal data, and create training materials. But AI doesn’t belong in every part of leave and accommodations. Employers should not allow AI to calculate leave eligibility without heavy human review. AI is also not an appropriate resource for determining law applicability or teasing out overlapping entitlements.
Step 4: Measure The Results
Business process optimization doesn’t end with implementation. Savvy teams measure their work, taking note of the successful changes and tweaking those with lackluster results.
When dairy co-op Tillamook modernized its leave management processes, it saw several measurable benefits. The company implemented widespread optimization, including an overhaul of manual, disjointed processes. Tillamook swapped its original approach for a centralized leave management system, powered by AbsenceSoft.
The change was powerful. Tillamook saved 10 hours per week by doing away with spreadsheets and shared drives. Business operations got better, too. Tillamook’s single-person leave department can manage more than 400 cases per year. Even while maintaining low headcount, the company has unlocked a more data-driven strategy, as the AbsenceSoft platform enabled easier reporting.
The benefits of BPO aren’t limited to the HR department. In Tillamook’s most recent Leave of Absence survey, 93% of employees reported a positive experience initiating their leave.
This is a significant competitive advantage. AbsenceSoft research has shown that employees are more likely to stay in their jobs and engage in their work when they have these kinds of experiences. Our findings also revealed that the opposite is true. When employees encounter issues during their leave, they’re more likely to leave their jobs, start looking for a new position, or advise people not to join their company.
How To Apply BPO When Compliance Matters
When you optimize processes in leave management, expect powerful results. BPO improves efficiencies and generates cost reductions. It can even improve customer satisfaction.
These outcomes are exciting, but it’s important to treat BPO with caution, especially in the leave management space. Leave and accommodations are heavily regulated, governed by many laws with highly specific requirements. Optimization can’t compromise compliance. By oversimplifying a process, you may cut corners and risk legal exposure.
As you look for a partner to support your optimization efforts, be sure to select an organization that furthers your compliance efforts, instead of diminishing them.
Get Started On BPO With AbsenceSoft
Optimizing your leave and accommodations program can feel like an overwhelming task. But small, compounding changes can create meaningful rewards. Here are a few ways you can start elevating your organization’s approach to leave and accommodations:
- Audit your current processes. Look for inefficiencies, delays, and bottlenecks. Ask people from all corners of your organization to tell you what frustrates them about your current approach.
- Rethink the status quo. Once you’ve pinpointed some elements of your program that you’d like to change, brainstorm potential fixes. Think of ways you can centralize and streamline your processes.
- Tap automation. A streamlined leave program is possible with the right technology. Look for a leave management system outfitted with intelligent automation.
If business process optimization interests you, download one of our free resources: Modernizing Leave Management: Simplifying FMLA, State, and Company Policies. You can also book a demo to learn more about how AbsenceSoft can elevate your organization’s leave program.
FAQs on Business Process Optimization
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Business process optimization is an intentional effort to create a specific change within an existing process in your organization. That change could be greater efficiency, ease, or any other kind of improvement.
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Business process automation is a tool that helps accomplish business process optimization. Think of business process optimization as an overarching goal and business process automation as a mechanism for progress toward that goal.
For example, you may want to improve your organization’s approach to communications surrounding leave and accommodations. Business process optimization is the framework you would use to pinpoint your frustrations, brainstorm solutions, and implement change. Within that, you might use business process automation to create efficiency within communication through automated messages, storage, documentation, etc.
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The benefits of business process optimization are numerous. By streamlining the leave and accommodations process, your organization can reduce costs, minimize administrative labor, reduce errors, boost compliance, and enhance the employee experience. When Tillamook modernized its approach to leave management, it saved 10 hours a week through automation and streamlined communication.
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There are many forms of business process optimization, including streamlining, reorganizing, and automating existing processes. Earlier in this article, we lay out a step-by-step guide to business process optimization that provides detailed examples of how this framework can apply to leave and accommodations.
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To identify inefficiencies in existing processes, we recommend a three-step approach. Begin by process mapping. Then, find which handoffs or manual steps cause delays. Finally, quantify the cost of each bottleneck.
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Yes. Streamlining processes is an important part of building a strategic leave and compliance program. As your organization devises ways to optimize its processes, factor in compliance requirements. Do not attempt to cut corners or speed through what regulations require you to do. Instead, support those efforts with technology, automating repetitive tasks where appropriate.