If you have a large or complex organisation, some of the best insights can be captured from the data held within your payroll database. This is where having the right technology really helps simplify things. We’ve found the following measures provide useful insights to the business, allowing managers and HR practitioners to spot trends, compare groups or identify outliers. The data provides the starting point to investigate why the differences exist and to track compliance to agreed company norms.
Some of these measures include:
· Track the average number of leave requests per employee by department each month. There should be a relatively consistent average across the organisation. You’re looking for the teams that have a significantly lower or higher number of requests over a period of time.
· Track the average balance of annual leave per employee by department. Look for the significant outlier. If there isn’t a good commercial reason why they have so much leave, there could be mismanagement by the manager, an overworked team, or leave requests aren’t being processed and you’re effectively paying employees twice. Looking at the leave management graph below, “site a” (shown as the blue bar) is indicating that something happening in the department and needs more investigation.
· Track the average balance of annual leave per employee by department over the last 12 months. This is a really simple one to see if you are getting leave information from your teams. It’s natural to expect the average balance to drop after key holiday periods (around Christmas and Easter) and in the following example you can see how only one team had their balance decrease between December and January (dark red). You can graph this information in excel, but having the right dashboard or analytics functionality can really help make this an easy task.
· Track the average balance of sick/personal leave taken per employee by department over the last 12 months. Everyone gets sick at some point and there should be an average level across most teams. You’re looking for one of two things:
o A significantly lower level of sick/personal leave taken than the other departments could indicate leave slippage within the team
o A significantly higher level of sick/personal leave taken than other departments could indicate a level of disengagement or cultural issues within the team. This could be investigated further by looking at employee turnover within the department compared to others.
Effective leave management is a mix of having great organisational processes and great technology to support this. Most of these tips can be handled manually, but with automation and simplification, administrative time can be reallocated to more value adding activities.
Datacom is here to help, as a market leading provider of cloud based payroll and HR services and consulting we’re able to help minimise your leave issues and associated costs through providing great technology and supporting your organisation to establish better processes.
If you’d like to talk to Datacom about our consulting services or technology please give us a call on 1800 048 006 (AU) or 0800 72 97 97(NZ)