How to Personalize Your Leave and Accommodations Program
This blog is an excerpt from our HR guide: Six Signs Your Organization is Ready to Insource Leave and Accommodation Management.
Many organizations today invest a lot of time and effort to build a unique work culture around shared values. Once created, companies want to make sure these organizational values and culture are infused across every employee experience. This leads many employers to explore ways to deliver a more customized and personalized leave and accommodations experience.
When you are handling your leave and accommodations processes manually, or outsourcing them to another provider, delivering this kind of personalization becomes challenging. When leave managers don’t have a centralized system or formal processes to provide consistency, an employee’s leave experience can vary a lot.
An employee might have a great experience if their leave manager is experienced and extremely knowledgeable, and not overwhelmed by other tasks and projects. However, it’s just as easy for an employee’s case to “slip through the cracks” in an organization with ad hoc processes and disparate apps. If your organization is outsourcing leave, you also don’t have many options for customizing communications and touchpoints to ensure a consistent experience. Employees end up interacting with people who aren’t part of your organization’s culture, and more often than not, those shared values don’t get translated into the overall experience.
By insourcing leave and accommodations management with a platform like AbsenceSoft, your organization can standardize and customize every part of an employee’s experience.
At AbsenceSoft, we’ve helped many large employers personalize their leave and accommodations program. The following are great ways to make sure your employees get a great experience that feels fully integrated with your organization’s work culture.
Customize every touchpoint
Every communication that is sent out, from letters to text messages, can be modified to reflect your organization’s culture and values. You can include specialized language that reflects your organization, such as “team member” instead of “employee,” as well as your logo and any other wording that is important to your employee experience initiatives. Leave management software allows employees to select the communication method that works best for them and can send personalized communications out via multiple delivery methods, including text and email.
Create and automate reminders and followups
With leave software, you can create automated reminders so that your employees get regular check-ins from your team. You can set different types of reminders for every leave types, to make sure employees feel fully supported throughout the leave process.
Offer self-service throughout the process
Employee self-service is another way technology can help you personalize the leave and accommodations experience. With the right technology, employees can request a leave or accommodation online, from any device, at any time. They can check back in to the portal to see the status of their request, and submit documentation when it is convenient for them.
More companies today are also offering new types of paid leave as a benefit to attract and retain top talent. However, tracking eligibility and usage of these new leave offerings can be a challenge, especially if you are using an outsourced provider. Each new leave policy they manage for you could add cost and complexity to your partnership.
With an in-house leave management system, you can add your company-specific leave policies directly into the system with no extra costs. The platform will automatically calculate eligibility for new paid leave benefits your company offers, including parental bonding leave, sabbaticals, mental health and wellness leave, and more.
If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of insourcing your leave program, check out the Six Signs Your Organization is Ready to Insource Leave Management.
