When an employee asks for a leave of absence or an accommodation, their request often marks a significant life event. They might need time off to welcome a new baby or care for a seriously ill spouse. Or they might be dealing with their own sickness or injury.
Employees facing such circumstances respond well to their employers’ support. According to a recent AbsenceSoft survey, a positive leave experience — marked by clear policies, supportive managers, and seamless pay — accelerates productivity and increases loyalty among employees.
The data also revealed that the opposite is true. When employees encounter a negative accommodations experience, for example, they feel less valued by their workplace and less motivated in their day-to-day work.
This data is important information for professional employment organizations (PEOs). As co-employers, PEOs are not only creating leave and accommodations experiences for their clients’ employees, but for their own workers as well.
It’s an extraordinary challenge, however, for PEOs to offer streamlined, supportive leave and accommodations experiences without the right tools. PEOs must manage federal, state, and local employment laws for multiple clients at a time. Complying with this tangled web of legislation can be a major challenge, requiring significant time and effort.
To boost compliance and optimize leave and accommodations processes, PEOs need high quality HR technology. By leveraging a leave management platform built to track hundreds of laws, enable employee requests, and optimize users’ workflow, PEOs can stay compliant while offering positive leave and accommodations experiences for clients and employees alike.
What is a PEO?
A PEO is an organization that provides HR outsourcing to small and mid-sized businesses. PEOs’ services often include payroll, benefits administration, and other HR services on behalf of their clients. These organizations also provide support in areas like compliance, risk, and safety. Partnering with a PEO allows organizations to focus on core business operations, rather than HR management.
In a co-employment relationship, both the PEO and its clients share employer responsibilities. Because the PEO offers human resource services like payroll processing and benefits administration, its clients can focus on delivering business value. For tax purposes, the PEO is the official employer of the client’s employees. The client, however, maintains full authority over its workforce.
Challenges PEOs Face in Leave and Accommodations Management
PEOs face a number of challenges in managing leave and accommodations for their clients and themselves.
Complicated Compliance
PEOs must navigate an increasingly complex and ever-changing legal landscape of federal, state, and local laws. New federal statutes like the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act add a host of requirements onto PEOs. Meanwhile, states are adding or updating laws with provisions regarding sick leave, parental leave, and other key protections and entitlements.
While new legislation is challenging to keep up with, PEOs also have to ensure accurate and timely compliance with longstanding statutes, like the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
These laws — old and new — come with their own timelines regarding communication and other deadlines, requiring a detailed understanding of each statute.
Compliance is difficult, but it’s crucial. Should PEOs run afoul of the law, they risk hefty fines. They also chance being named in lawsuits, which could damage their reputation while racking up expenses.
Too Much Administrative Work
Managing leave and accommodations requires a lot of administrative work. PEOs frequently assume this workload for their clients, which means they’re handling cases on behalf of their clients and their own employees.
When PEOs — or any organization — attempt to handle leave and accommodations without the right tools, they often face an overwhelming amount of tedious work. Teams are responsible for HR tasks like:
- Entering employee data
- Tracking leave requests
- Tracking accommodations requests
- Processing paperwork
- Approving and administrating each case
Most teams struggle to carry out leave and accommodation management manually, relying on a combination of sticky notes, calendar reminders, spreadsheets, and folders. When requests come in from worksite employees in multiple states, the administrative work multiplies, such as researching laws and entitlements, finding and sending the right paperwork, calculating eligibility and entitlements, and more.
Inconsistent Employee Experiences
Managing leave and accommodations is not just about filing the right paperwork on time or tracking leave usage. It’s also about ensuring employees have a positive experience from start to finish.
In a recent survey, AbsenceSoft found that poor leave experiences impact employee loyalty and retention. Of employees who reported a bad leave experience, 51% said they felt less loyal to their company, and 42% said they were less motivated upon returning to work.
Our report also revealed that a positive leave experience boost motivation and productivity. When employees reported a positive experience, 55% said they were more motivated and 50% said they were more productive upon returning to work. Another 47% and 41% said they felt increased loyalty to their workplace and manager, respectively.
PEOs are directly responsible for the experience their worksite employees encounter when taking leave or requesting accommodations. But it’s challenging to provide consistently positive experiences when managing different policies and processes across clients and worksites. Streamlining compliance and administration with technology built for PEOs enables PEOs to focus their attention on what matters most — the worksite employee.
How Technology Can Improve How PEOs Manage Leave and Accommodations
PEOs can overcome these challenges with technology that simplifies compliance, enables a personalized employee experience, and centralizes case information.
Enhanced Compliance
When PEOs implement a leave and accommodations platform, they greatly reduce their compliance challenges. For example, AbsenceSoft’s Compliance Engine™ combines powerful technology with input from in-house compliance experts, ensuring it stays up to date on legal and regulatory changes.
Platforms like AbsenceSoft automate tasks and enforce processes with workflows that meet timelines mandated by the FMLA and other key employment laws. Users can trust automation to send employees their rights and responsibilities notice on time, every time.
The platform also makes sure organizations are ready for audits and complaints. Users can pull comprehensive case data on a case the moment an issue arises. Furthermore, maintaining compliance across all 50 states means PEOs can serve an even larger market and increase their valuation.
Streamlined Administration
With leave and accommodations technology, PEOs can also expect to work more efficiently. Automation keeps processes quick. Once an employee makes a request, the platform initiates the next steps, ushering in documentation and administrative approvals.
The centralized platform streamlines operations for PEOs managing leave for clients operating in multiple locations. Not only does it minimize compliance questions, but it also stores leave-related information in one convenient, secure location.
The bottom line? Leave and accommodations management software reduces administrative burden for PEOs and their clients. With improved efficiency, users can focus on their client relationships and other strategic priorities.
Improved Employee Experience
Leave and accommodations technology also offers benefits for worksite employees. PEO leave administrators, client supervisors and worksite employees gain a hub that is both easy to access and discreet. They’ll find:
- A self-service portal where they can submit requests.
- A tool that allows them to track the status of their requests, whether they’re being hashed out or in progress.
- A platform that makes communications effortless and efficient.
Software also improves the employee experience in less direct, but still significant ways. For instance, the right technology allows employers to maintain clear and consistent policies and procedures, ensuring that each employee is treated equally. It also offers PEOs the ability to add client-specific policies that incorporate into existing eligibility calculations.
Increased Revenue Streams
It’s worth noting that PEOs can increase their revenue through enhanced leave and accommodations offerings. A leave management platform makes the task not only more manageable but also helps PEOs turn it into a value-add for their clients with additional features like employee self-service. With technology, PEOs can handle leave and accommodations management for their clients with ease.
Choosing the Right Solution for Your PEO
When it comes to choosing a specific leave and accommodations management solution, it’s important to select carefully. Start by considering your organization’s specific needs and requirements. PEOs have specialized needs when it comes to leave and accommodations platforms, and not all providers have the capabilities in place to effectively manage multiple clients in a single platform. These include:
- Create reports on leave and accommodations by employer
- Automatic notifications when an employer reaches the employee count thresholds for coverage by the FMLA
- Case reassignment and caseload balancing for leave teams and call centers
The solution you choose should deliver on the most important attributes of a leave and accommodations system: compliance and security. The platform should prioritize compliance so that you can be confident your processes remain within the boundaries of federal, state, and local employment laws.
Finally, look for a solution that is user-friendly, scalable, and cost-effective. It’s important that the platform won’t be a burden on users or the company budget. And choose a partner that will be able to enable your growth, not hold you back.
Manage leave and accommodations better with AbsenceSoft
The AbsenceSoft platform boosts compliance, drives efficiency, and creates a top-tier employee experience. The AbsenceSoft Compliance Engine™ (ACE) — built and maintained by a team of compliance experts — supports over 200 federal and state leave and accommodations laws. The platform streamlines and centralizes case management so users can not only access information quickly but also leverage data for analytics and reporting.
To learn more about how AbsenceSoft can simplify leave and accommodations management at your PEO, book a demo today.