Today’s employers don’t need to fly blind when they want to drive performance and satisfaction. Workplace data offers a trove of insights that can bolster business outcomes and improve employee experience for those going out on leave. But leave data can be used to make the day-to-day better for teams administering leave themselves.
When organizations use the right leave management platform to insource their leave program, they gain access to comprehensive, real-time data. This data can help organizations optimize the employee experience for HR and leave managers, especially as rising caseloads increase the threat of burnout.
Today’s leave management teams are overwhelmed, and the data shows why. Employee leave requests have increased for the last three years, according to AbsenceSoft reports. In 2023, 62% of HR pros reported that requests were up at their organizations. The next year, 57% said the same thing. And just last year, 53% reported increasing numbers.
The consistency of this trend points to cumulative growth in leave requests. Some teams may be managing as many as 120% more cases than they were just three years ago.
HR and leave teams need data to understand the inner workings of their leave program. Insights can help them understand what’s working and where their bottlenecks are. Data can also help organizations improve the way leave managers manage rising caseloads and increasing workforce complexity.
In this article, we will explore several ways that platform data can be used to boost your leave team’s satisfaction and performance, while preserving their stamina and boosting their morale.
Start With the Right Technology
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 jobs more effectively while proving the data you need to better manage your team.
Dedicated leave technology is especially important considering the recent rise of AI solutions. Forty-five percent of employers now use AI in leave management through tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. These tools may be helpful, but they can lead to problems with accuracy in reporting. What’s more, uploading raw program data into a public large language model poses a serious privacy risk.
Look for leave tools that leverage AI while accounting for the technology’s strengths and weaknesses. If your team is overwhelmed, a purpose-built leave tool can provide the productivity boost they need without exposing your organization to risk.
Keep in mind, however, that not all leave management solutions are built the same. Make sure the leave solution you’re considering allows you to:
- Create and customize dashboards
- Run customized reports
- Export reports
- Provide sharable reports with team members
- Schedule reports
- Track accommodations data in addition to leaves of absence data
- Integrate with other HR systems, to make sure every system has up-to-date employee data
By supporting your insourced leave management program with technology, you can get a robust level of insights and visibility. Leave management software like AbsenceSoft streamlines and automates your team’s administrative tasks, while centralizing 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.
Improve Team Performance While Balancing Morale
Gaining insights into your leave program will help you monitor your team’s progress and spot warning signs for burnout. Data will allow you to 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 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.
Accommodations overview report
Leave requests aren’t the only thing on the rise. According to our recent report, accommodations were up similarly: 60% of teams saw increases in 2025, with 62% reporting growth of 21% or more.
To manage accommodations compliantly, employers need to achieve high levels of consistency. An accommodations overview report helps you stay on top of your accommodations programming by displaying:
- open accommodations cases
- accommodations requests by type
- the average duration of accommodations requests
Remember, accommodations and leave are not separate entities. Leave is a top accommodation — as popular as remote work, according to our survey. One life event often requires HR to track both a leave of absence and workplace accommodations, making software that can manage both sides of the equation an absolute necessity.
Caseload report
This report helps to identify if one team member is taking on a lot more cases than others, and lets you know whether 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.
This report can also illustrate how technology accelerates your team’s productivity. When HR pros manage leave manually, the average case per manager stands at 28 cases. A spreadsheet-based approach allows for an average caseload of 36. With dedicated leave software, however, each manager can take on an average of 59 cases.
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 or closed, when the cases were closed, and more. 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
Of course, case count isn’t the only way you should view your team’s output. 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 it 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’s workload and allow for better organization based on case complexity. If someone has a lot of experience with California Family Rights Act cases, for example, those cases can be automatically assigned to that employee.
Access Instant, Comprehensive Data with AbsenceSoft
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.