As one of the largest resorts in Northern California, Cache Creek Casino Resort employs over 2,000 people in Yolo County. Benefits Supervisor Wendy Ayala has been managing leave and accommodations at Cache Creek Casino Resort for over nine and a half years, along with five other team members.
Wendy’s team receives hundreds of leave requests every year. At any given time, there can be over 100 employees out on a leave of absence. For many years, Wendy and her team had to manage each case manually, using a process filled with the risk of error — and even data loss.
Whenever a new leave request came in, a leave team member manually created a new folder on a computer drive that was shared between team members. For every medical certification that came in, a subfolder would be created for it, and a copy stored there. When a case needed review, questions needed to be answered, or the time came to review documents for an accommodation, it took a lot of time to locate the right details. Because each team member was responsible for uploading each document manually, there was a chance of error as well.
“We had a shared drive that had a folder for every single employee and a subfolder for every single one of their leaves of absence. And then subfolders for their doctor’s notes, subfolders for their med certs, subfolders for all their stuff. It was bananas,” recalled Wendy.
Once they started managing leave with AbsenceSoft, the shared drive was no more. Wendy and her team could log in to the platform, and all the employee data was accessible immediately. Their entire case management process was automated, with pre-generated communications, instant eligibility calculations, time tracking, and more. Each incoming document was automatically attached to each case without the team needing to manually upload documents.
“AbsenceSoft saved us hours upon hours of time. Being able to just go to one spot and see everything related to a case is just, I can’t even tell you how helpful that is,” said Wendy.
Another issue the Cache Creek Casino Resort team had was slow responding employees that delayed the leave process. They found that when they contacted their employees via text messaging, people responded much faster. With AbsenceSoft, they were able to seamlessly incorporate texting into their leave process. They could automate employee reminders, respond to inquiries, and more — and all the text messages were centrally stored and attached to each case.
“I can’t even talk enough about the ability to send text messages,” said Wendy. “We have probably run the wheels off of that to send reminders to people. From ‘hey, you’ve got paperwork that’s due’ or ‘your leave is about to end’ to ‘we need a release for you to come back to work and we haven’t heard from you.’ And we’re now putting together a process to reach out to the pregnant moms. We just love sending these types of things, so that feature is just incredible.”
Cache Creek Casino Resort must follow a complex reporting structure for intermittent time leave requests due to union policies. Before using AbsenceSoft, Wendy was tracking intermittent leave usage in an Excel spreadsheet. This ran huge risks of inaccurate entitlement calculations and put a huge burden of data entry on Wendy’s team. Today, intermittent leave time is tracked in the right increments, and automatically against a time bank for each employee.
Wendy also needed to regularly report on how much intermittent leave was used. Pulling that data from spreadsheets was extremely time-consuming. However, Wendy and her team wanted to be proactive and let people know when they were running out of entitled time and would no longer have job protection.
Today, AbsenceSoft makes that much simpler. Wendy’s team can run an intermittent leave usage report in a few minutes with Insights. Each report shows her which employees have used intermittent leave, how much of their leave they have used, where they are located, and more.
“Insights has just made that whole thing so easy. I can’t even tell you how much of a relief it is,” said Wendy.
To help leave managers with case management, AbsenceSoft automatically generates lists of tasks for each user called “to-dos.” Twice a day, Wendy looks at a dashboard that includes all of the to-dos her team has. This allows her to prioritize her team’s workload based on the most urgent tasks and deadlines for each. She can also see if any tasks are overdue, so she can address them and get them completed as soon as possible.
AbsenceSoft’s reporting features also help her stay compliant with rules around the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). The FMLA has time requirements for sending and receiving forms and documents throughout the process. If Wendy’s team doesn’t stay within those guidelines, they risk a complaint or lawsuit.
“I use Insights to see where we are in the review of the documents we’ve received, especially the medical certifications. Are we within compliance? When was the oldest one we received? How long ago was that? Am I in my five business days processing compliance? And then if I need to assist in getting us into compliance, I will do that,” said Wendy.
Not only has AbsenceSoft saved Cache Creek Casino Resort’s leave process, it has changed the entire way Wendy and her team operate. With automatically generated task lists, centrally stored data, and access to real-time data, they have fully modernized their leave program. Today, they can all work much more efficiently, strategically, and compliantly.
To learn how AbsenceSoft can help you streamline and automate your leave and accommodations programs, schedule a demo today.