Featured Research: How Today's Organizations Manage Employee Leave

Highlights from exclusive research by HR.com's Research Institute and UNUM

There are many complexities associated with employee leave management that non-HR professionals may not be able to understand.

How do organizations approach leave management? What differentiates organizations that are more effective at managing leave from those that are less effective? How are organizations using technology or outsourcing to help with leave management? And, what are the biggest challenges of leave management?

To explore these questions, HR.com's Research Institute conducted a survey, “Employee Leave 2019,” in the first quarter of 2019, in partnership with UNUM, a leading provider of financial protection benefits in the U.S. and U.K. and the leading provider of disability income protection in the world.

The report – ‘How Today's Organizations Manage Employee Leave’ – includes full research insights and 10 key takeaways that HR professionals can apply or consider in overseeing their own leave policies.

Here are several highlights from the research findings:

It is rare for HR to describe leave management as excellent, though 44% say it is good. This means, however, 41% of HR professionals describe the effectiveness of leave management as fair, poor, or very poor. In other words, there is much room for improvement in this critical area of talent management.

It is a bit shocking that so many companies (37%) are still using manual processes to manage leave. The most up-to-date approaches to leave management—cloud-based software and outsourcing—are used by just 11% and 15% of organizations, respectively. About a fifth of organizations (18%) have homegrown systems. The good news is that third-party, cloud-based systems are continually getting better and easier to implement.

While many aspects of employee leave are mandated by law or statute, most organizations (67%) go beyond that and offer some additional types of leave. It's a reminder that leave is a part of the employee value proposition and can be tuned to the needs of your workforce.

One of the main reasons that leave management is challenging is that policies can vary due to factors such as employment status, exempt versus non-exempt status, region, and unionization. Two-thirds of organizations face at least one of these complications. While it would be easier to administer a single leave policy universally applied across the organization, this is not an option in most cases. That means HR must build processes and use systems that take into account this complexity.

A large majority of organizations expect they will have to deal with new laws and regulations around leave (85% agree or strongly agree) and that employee leave issues will grow more complex (75% agree or strongly agree).


 
To learn much more about the survey results on How Today's Organizations Manage Employee Leave and to get 10 key insights and strategic takeaways, we invite you to read the complete report here: