Absence management is a broad category. It includes the administration of everything from sick days and vacations to reduced schedules and long-term leave.
Across this spectrum, it’s the lengthier absences that have a greater impact on employees. Longer leaves of absence are often taken during challenging life events. An AbsenceSoft report found that employees are more likely to quit when they encounter a poor leave experience, which often results from confusing processes, bad communication, and pay errors.
Short-term absence management requires comprehensive tracking that can often be accomplished through an HRIS. But it’s far more complicated to manage longer leaves of absence covered by laws like the Family Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, state leave laws, and company policies. Given their impact on employees’ lives in and out of the office, they’re essential to get right.
In this article, you’ll learn what modern, effective long-term absence management entails, the challenges it creates, and the tools modern HR teams are using to succeed.
What Is Absence Management?
To start this guide off right, we’ll begin by defining our terms. We’ll clarify the confusion around absence management — an uncertainty that stems from overlapping vocabulary.
The Terminology Problem
Here’s the origin of all the confusion: Absence management can refer to two different types of leave administration. The term can apply to daily attendance tracking. But it can also point to comprehensive leave administration.
To make matters more confusing, HR uses the terms absence management and leave management interchangeably. Meanwhile, vendors attach varying definitions to those terms, further muddling the discussion.
What This Guide Covers: Long-Term Leave Administration
In this guide, we’re going to tackle what we refer to as long-term leave administration. This term includes a host of absences, including those covered by:
- The Family and Medical Leave Act
- The Americans with Disabilities Act
- The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act
- State leave laws
- Parental leave
- Medical leave
While the leave covered by these laws and policies is typically longer than the absences occurring from day to day, there’s another distinguishing factor. These absences require a significant amount of work: documentation, eligibility calculations, medical certification, compliance tracking, the interactive process, and so on. Dealing with these absences is not as simple as marking someone out for the day.
If you are managing leaves that require strategic effort, you’re performing absence management. Your organization may call it something else. But in this guide, your effort qualifies as long-term absence management.
The Core Components of Absence Management
Before we dive into the specifics of long-term leave administration, let’s take a moment to define what effective absence management looks like. It includes:
- Request intake and case initiation
- Eligibility determination across federal, state, and company policies
- Documentation and medical certification management
- Employee and manager communication
- Compliance tracking and deadline management
- Return to work coordination
It’s important to note that leave and accommodations are heavily intertwined. When someone returns to work after taking time off to recover from an injury or surgery, they’ll likely need an accommodation. According to our data, remote work is an extremely common accommodation in these circumstances.
The Biggest Challenges HR Teams Face with Absence Management
Leave administration is an increasingly challenging and complex function. It’s essential that employers get it right. Mistakes can damage employee morale, exacerbate employee turnover, and result in expensive lawsuits or fines.
Rising Request Volume Without More Resources
Here’s the reality HR faces: 53% of employers saw increased leave requests in 2025, and not for the first time. HR leaders have been flagging an uptick in leave requests for years. This steady increase means that many teams are managing twice the volume they were three years ago.
More leave requests aren’t a problem in and of themselves. But few teams have reported an equal expansion in headcount, tools, or resources. This means many HR departments are relying on manual processes that can’t scale with increased demand. Leave managers are drowning in case load as a result, and the quality of their work is eroding as they throttle their output.
Compliance Complexity That Never Stops Growing
As HR teams take on more work than ever before, compliance grows more challenging. What factors are contributing to this challenge? Some of it isn’t new: 41% of HR professionals cite FMLA compliance as their top challenge. But teams are also struggling to comply with other statutes, including federal, state, and local legislation. The state leave law landscape is changing rapidly. Every new law is unique in its details, yet many of them share similarities, creating confusion.
Despite this, 41% of HR teams are continuing to manage state leave manually, with tools like spreadsheets and email. With this approach, leave managers risk missing deadlines, making inconsistent decisions, and creating compliance gaps.
The Stakes Are High for Employee Experience
Employers have a lot to lose when it comes to absence management. They also have a lot to gain. In other words, it’s important to get leave and accommodations right. When employees have poor leave experiences, 51% say they end up feeling less loyal to their company, according to an AbsenceSoft survey. More than a third said the experience made them start looking for a new job.
What creates a poor leave experience? For nearly half of respondents, a poor leave experience stemmed from confusing or unclear processes. This is an avoidable frustration. By implementing clear processes and leveraging automation, employers can create positive leave experiences.
These experiences are powerful. Employees who had good leave experiences said they felt more motivated, more productive, and more loyal.
Managing Connected Cases Across Siloed Systems
Leave is not an isolated experience. Employees who need time off work often need workplace accommodations once they’re back on the job. Consider, for example, an employee who takes a month off to recover from back surgery. When she comes back to work, she may qualify for ADA accommodations like frequent breaks to stretch, intermittent leave to attend physical therapy, or short-term light duty.
The PWFA also entitles workers to accommodations. A worker may need a flexible schedule to deal with morning sickness long before taking parental leave. After returning to work, the employee may need a similar accommodation to deal with pregnancy-related conditions after giving birth.
Situations like these illustrate why, after remote work, leave and time off is the most requested accommodation, according to our 2026 survey.
Leave and accommodations are interrelated, but few employers manage them within one system. Fragmented management leads to a fragmented employee experience, and extra administrative work for HR.
Best Practices for Modern Absence Management
As more employees ask for time off and leave laws multiply, absence management grows more challenging. Below, we lay out five best practices that will help your team succeed.
1. Centralize Everything in One System
When your organization implements absence management software, it makes way for a single source of truth. Your leave platform will serve as your team’s one destination for all things leave, including cases, accommodations, and documentation.
High-quality absence management software will provide a secure place for your team to store sensitive, often confidential information. It will ensure your organization abides by laws like HIPPA and respects employees’ privacy. Storing information centrally will also generate audit trails for compliance.
Centralizing your leave processes will create visibility across the full employee journey. Your platform will be the place where your team will manage the entire leave lifecycle, from the original leave of absence to accommodation to an employee’s full return.
2. Automate the Administrative Burden (With Human Oversight)
Automation plays an important role in reducing the administrative burden your team faces in absence management. Here are a few ways AI can supercharge your team’s productivity:
- AI can make rules-based eligibility calculations, reducing errors and saving time.
- Some absence management platforms, like AbsenceSoft, can auto-generate compliant forms and packets based on case type.
- Workflows can instantly generate reminders, deadlines, and follow-ups.
It’s worth noting that 45% of HR leaders already use AI in leave processes, according to our 2026 survey. AI is an incredibly effective tool, so long as it’s embedded in systems with strong guardrails that are designed to support compliance.
3. Make It Easy for Employees and Managers
Leave management software makes management easier for HR and several other parties. Self-service portals ease the employee experience, providing an easy-to-access destination for requests, document uploads, and status checks. Our platform, for instance, supports multi-channel communication, enabling all users to interact through email, text, and portal.
Absence management software also positions managers for success. Forty-four percent of employees request leave from managers first, as opposed to going to HR. But managers often lack the training to handle leave requests with the care they require. Leave technology provides clear escalation paths, ensuring managers follow protocol for each and every case.
4. Stay Ahead of Compliance Changes
The rules and requirements governing absence management change almost constantly. Even with a shifting legal landscape, your team can still achieve compliance. Here’s how:
- Use technology that tracks changes to federal and state law and updates forms and protocols automatically.
- Tap platforms with built-in compliance engines that calculate entitlements across overlapping policies.
- Provide regular manager training on recognizing requests and following protocol.
5. Invest in Integration
Integrations are key to a healthy tech stack. When implementing a leave platform, be sure to connect your absence management platform with other HR technologies, like your HRIS, payroll, and time tracking platforms. When these systems are connected, real-time data sharing reduces manual entry and errors. What’s more, it makes way for stronger reporting and analytics, which are key for strategic decision-making.
When It’s Time to Move Absence Management Beyond Spreadsheets
It’s not difficult to determine whether your team would benefit from an absence management platform. If any of the following statements describes your organization, it’s likely that leave software would greatly strengthen its performance.
- Your organization manages 50 or more leave cases each year.
- Your organization’s workforce is distributed across multiple states.
- Your team currently uses spreadsheets, shared drives, email folders, and calendar reminders for absence management.
- Your team deals with compliance anxiety or has experienced near-misses with deadlines.
- Employees have complained about confusing processes or lackluster experiences.
- Your company’s leaders are asking for program data your team can’t easily produce.
What to Look for in a Solution
When your organization is ready to upgrade its processes, it’s important to consider your options for absence management software carefully. We recommend looking for a tool that provides:
- A compliance engine: The AbsenceSoft Compliance Engine tracks national laws like the FMLA, ADA, and PWFA, in addition to more than 200 state leave laws.
- An integrated approach: Your team should be able to manage leave AND accommodations from one system.
- Automation — with oversight: A high-quality platform uses AI to reduce admin work while preserving human judgment.
- Employee and manager portals: A mobile-friendly portal provides a place where employees can request leave, upload documents, check status, and receive updates at any time. Managers can quickly login to see an employee’s leave dates, and plan for their return to work.
- Robust reporting: The AbsenceSoft platform offers real-time dashboards and customizable reports that include critical data about your leave and accommodations programs. Over time, this data helps HR identify bottlenecks, forecast volume, and demonstrate program value to leadership.
- Integration capability: Secure integrations with your team’s most trusted and frequently used platforms pave the way for simpler, more streamlined leave and accommodations management. AbsenceSoft, for example, connects with popular HRIS platforms like Workday, UKG, and others.
Elevate Absence Management with AbsenceSoft
Leave requests are on the rise for a number of reasons. Employees are more informed about their right to leave, and they’re more confident in asking for time off. There are also cultural shifts making leave more desirable, accessible, and acceptable.
As leave requests surge, employers are seeing the business impact of their processes. Poor leave experiences damage retention, while good experiences build loyalty. Manual processes can’t ensure that employers provide good experiences at scale. They also increase the risk of costly compliance errors.
Modern absence management platforms ensure organizations stay compliant while delivering high-quality employee experiences. Ready to see how a purpose-built absence management software can transform your team’s approach to leave? Schedule a demo with AbsenceSoft today.