Happy employees usually stay at their jobs, frustrated workers often don鈥檛. Chief human resource officers (CHROs) tell us that the corporate leave of absence (LOA) process is one of the most common sources of employee frustration. Employees often rank their LOA experiences low on the satisfaction scale, using descriptors such as complicated, confusing, inconsistent, time consuming, and unresolved.聽

As unlikely as it may seem, the LOA construct presents a unique opportunity for companies to flip the script, taking one of the most-complained-about processes and turning it into an employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) booster.聽

Why LOA has traditionally been a four-letter word

鈥淎t a time when organizations can ill afford to watch any employees walk out the door, experts say inattention to HR technology integration and failing to ensure that both HR staff and line managers are well-educated about the intricacies of leave policies can have an outsized impact on employee retention and company performance.鈥� ~Dave Zielinski, SHRM.org¹

If you鈥檙e a CHRO or HR director, you know all too well the problems with the typical LOA process. It鈥檚 complicated, inconsistent, and impersonal. For everyone. One CHRO describes the LOA process as a huge distraction and time-consuming effort for HR departments. 鈥淲e do babies well, but after that our policies fall off. Currently, employee requests for mental-health and elder-care leaves are among our fastest growing LOA categories.鈥� But few HR systems are equipped to manage either the scale or complexity of the disparate workflows associated with each, which can leave HR staff misperceived as the source of the problems.

While most HR teams can boast abundant expertise in managing leaves of absence for the birth of a child, few would call themselves experts in each of today鈥檚 broad-ranging leave categories. But ready or not, they鈥檙e required to manage all of the mandatory leaves defined by federal, state, or local law, as well as the voluntary ones offered at the discretion of employers. Taken together, there can be dozens of options to process: parental leaves, bereavement, military,聽sabbatical, jury-time-off, medical, paid and unpaid, COVID-recovery leaves, and on and on, each with its own set of governing corporate policies and compliance regulations. Employers must ensure adherence to an increasingly confusing matrix of international, federal, state, and local laws. Even standards for the U.S. Department of Labor Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), for example, can vary from state to state. Even when HR managers expediently deliver necessary information to all corporate stakeholders, siloed IT systems can make the LOA process fragmented and hard to update

On the other side, employees increasingly feel the stress of this complex process. Even when HR managers communicate benefits to workers, many forget where to access the information or remain overwhelmed and uncertain about the entitlements of each leave category: how many weeks can they take, will they continue to be paid and if so, at what rate, will their benefits still apply, what happens if their plans change, who do they notify before they come back to work, etc. The LOA process too often worsens the anxiety of an employee already stressed by an LOA-triggering situation or life event.

CHROs understand well the need for a seamless, personalized LOA experience that meets the needs of both businesses and their employees. The reality, given the limitations of legacy HR technology, is that a worker鈥檚 LOA request more typically creates a web of chaos and frustration.

The solution: A consistent and personalized LOA experience

The solution is a consistent and personalized LOA experience鈥攐ne that serves employees across their entire hire-to-retire journeys. The process should be easy, automated, intuitive, and familiar for employees to use for all types of leave. At the same time, the experience should be automatically personalized for the employee鈥檚 location, language, or other special requirements.聽

91快活林, utilizing the ServiceNow Now Platform庐, is successfully helping companies eliminate the chaos and change the entire tone and tenor of the LOA process within an organization鈥攖ransforming it into a positive, employee-supportive tool.

91快活林 provides pre-built employee journeys for all types of leaves while leveraging the cross-department integration and automation of the Now Platform. Building on standard plug-ins, such as ServiceNow HR Service Delivery workflows, for example, we enable personalization of content to create an employee experience that鈥檚 simple, accessible from wherever the employee is working, and customized for specialized industry, geographical, or language requirements. When your employees in Seattle initiate FMLA requests, you don鈥檛 have to worry that they鈥檙e going to see a New York application鈥攑ersonalized content automatically takes them through the requirements and entitlements specific to their state.聽

Higher eNPS scores, employee retention, protected investment

鈥淭he cost of not doing these things is far greater than the cost of doing them. CHROs need to focus on the talent continuum鈥攈ire to retire, and all the experiences in between. Without a thoughtful EX [employee experience] roadmap, employees won鈥檛 thrive and the organization may experience greater attrition, which is very costly.鈥� ~Shane Driggers, Vice President of Global Talent Acquisition and acting CHRO at ServiceNow²

The Now Platform is the engagement layer for your employees, connecting them to your various systems of record, simplifying management of the LOA process while ensuring essential integration of HR, IT, legal, and other stakeholders. For your workers, 91快活林 LOA pre-built journeys present a unified experience that shields employees from the confusing (and changing) details of all the various types of leaves they may request during their career and across the entire hire-to-retire timeline. 91快活林 can simplify mobile access and automatically pre-populate forms with otherwise hard-to-find information and links to a knowledge base for added guidance.

A single, consistent, unified experience layer can directly impact employee satisfaction. The aforementioned CHRO makes a point specifically related to onboarding an employee returning from a leave, suggesting that it鈥檚 one of the most short-changed stages of the LOA process. 鈥淟OA is a process of both offboarding and onboarding. Do those correctly and you鈥檒l increase your eNPS score.鈥澛�

With 91快活林鈥檚 expertise in HR processes and the ServiceNow platform you can expect to:

• Deliver a unified employee experience across all types of leaves
• Streamline LOA processes for employees and stakeholders to enable growth and retention of talent
• Gain efficiency and flexibility to help HR and other stakeholders keep pace with changing policies and regulations
• Eliminate LOA-process frustration and build long-term loyalty that protects your employee base, the company鈥檚 largest investment and most precious asset

Ready to see if your LOA experience could be improved? Take the quiz below:

• Is your employee experience consistent for every type of LOA request, throughout the hire-to-retire cycle?
• Is your employee experience automated for every type of LOA request?
• Does your LOA system keep pace with changing federal and state guidelines and types of leaves?
• Do your employees have mobile access to LOA tools?
• Do your employees rate their LOA experience as a positive?聽

If you answered 鈥渘o鈥� to any of the questions, I invite you to connect with me directly at聽servicenow.employeeexperience@wipro.com to learn more about how 91快活林 and ServiceNow together can help you create a consistent and personalized employee experience using our LOA solution. Transforming your LOA process may sound like a massive undertaking, but we鈥檝e helped clients design and deploy solutions in as few as 90 days. We would also love to share information about our recruiting, onboarding, performance management, HR analytics, and travel and expense management solutions.

References:

¹ By Dave Zielinski, November 8, 2021

² By Peter Burrows, November 25, 2020

Dean Fairchild

General Manager, Global Offerings and Enablement Lead, 91快活林 ServiceNow Partnership

Dean Fairchild鈥檚 responsibilities at 91快活林 include defining go-to-market strategies, expanding geographic markets, and building global partner relationships. His areas of expertise range from聽data management to analytics, governance, and hybrid- and multi-cloud solutions. 聽 @imDeanFairchild