Leave management becomes troublesome when you are at the first stage of your business.
Whether you run a startup or an SME, employee management is tough. This initiates urgency for the right HR management tips to maintain the work force.
This article will help you step-by-step on setting up leave policies. You can use some outstanding tools to manage better. Keep reading to find out what they can be!
Tips for HR Management in Startups and SMEs
Managing people is a hectic task. Even in the smallest company, you will need to maintain your workforce effectively. Otherwise, you might end up losing precious time from your work life.
So, whether you are a business owner or an HR manager, you should follow some management tips. Here, we have a few HR management tips you can check. These guidelines will make your HR job easier than before!
Receive Updates on Regular Reviews
Reviewing the performance of your employees is a must for any HR personnel. We encourage checking up on every three to six months. This will allow you evaluate if the business goals are being met.
So, you must track the performance and engagement of the team. For this, you can use software to ease the process. A software helps to automatically boost appraisals, and update both parties. This will help to increase employee morale and work for the growth of your business.
A time off app can become much handy in this case. Employees can track their request status of company workflow. The company can set up the correct amount of workflow for the employees as well.
Using a paid time off tracker is much efficient. Day Off has a well-designed time off tracker which can benefit both employees and HR.
You might want to use a free time off tracker if you have very low investment. Still, you won’t regret using one as it balances off workflow much smoothly.
Secure all the Documents in a Cloud Software
With the pandemic hitting, almost everyone now works remotely. As such, recording and retrieving all of the working documents became necessary. In this crucial time, you certainly have nothing but to provide extra flexibility to your employees. This means you have lesser option to control the wide range of work.
In order to synthesize workflow, you must secure all the documents in a cloud software. By accessing the software, the employees will be able to work from home. At the same time, you can supervise how they are working.
There is a benefit to this idea. Both employees and the authority can access those files whenever they want. This will tremendously boost productivity. Also, it’s easier to measure who is really serious about his/her work.
Not to mention the benefits reminders and alerts promote. You will get your task done at the right time. Time management is safely secured!
Use Software for Everything
We all used spreadsheets at some point in our work life. It’s not really an inconvenience but you should adopt better measures to make things faster.
As an HR or the business owner, try switching to different management software instead of spreadsheets. This will provide you a huge advantage in the long run. Recording employee information, keeping up with the training schedules, assigning tasks all of them becomes easier.
You will be able to save time and focus on other revenue focused work. Also, some software enables users to automate the regular tasks. Tasks will get reduced and you will find the perfect work life balance.
Maintain Leave Requests Appropriately
We’ll now introduce the most crucial tip – leave management. It’s pretty obvious that your employees will take leaves. They can either request leaves according to their convenience or the company may arrange some paid leave policies.
For startups and SMEs, it might be hectic at times to manually manage this. It usually becomes a problem when the work force is huge and diversified.
So, the best way to tackle this problem is to use leave management software. For example, the Day Off app allows organizing employee leaves and requests in one place.
To maintain employee leaves you can follow the basic steps below:
- Keep a calendar to update employee leaves.
- Assign leave allowances for each employee.
- Use software to track leave requests.
- Share the leave planning updates with the workforce. It will help to mitigate the upcoming clashes of tasks assigned.
This is just a glimpse of how to manage leaves in a startup or in an SME.
Don’t worry, we’ll provide more in depth leave management procedures in the next section.
Leave Management Tactics in Startups and SMEs
There is a reason for us to emphasize on leave management too much. It’s because employee sentiments and salaries are related to leaves. Whether your employees take a paid leave or an unpaid leave, both will tremendously affect your business.
And if you are unorganized regarding this matter, it will cost you both time and money. You don’t want that! Do you?
This leads to the fact that you must devise a full-proof leave management policy. These policies must be in favor of the company as well as the employees.
While devising these policies, you must keep in mind about the following.
- Employee Salary
- Performance
- Appraisals
Step-by-step Employee Leave Policy
Set Eligibility Criteria for Taking Leaves
Before you sanction any leave to an employee, you must ensure if the employee is eligible to take a leave. Not all employees will receive the same facilities. You have to clearly state rules for each position an employee belongs.
Let’s jump on to the factors that influence Leave Management Policies.
- Leave during probation period
- Taking leaving while serving a notice
- Simultaneous leaves
- Entitled annual leaves
- Quantum of approved leaves at a time
Another most crucial indicator is the type of leaves. Every leave has a different pattern and timeline. A maternity leave and sabbatical can’t get the same weightage. So, you must ensure that you are devising the correct policies for each type of leave.
Some crucial leaves are:
Statutory leave
This type of leave is built by the government to provide facilities to the working class. Government and private firms have different rules and regulations to measure statutory leaves. An employee has the right to get these leaves and get paid in due time.
Maternity leave
Maternity leaves are for expected mothers. Even after the baby born, mothers get maternity leaves. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) states that US companies are bound to allow unpaid maternity leave for 12 weeks. In this case, the company must have 50 or more employees.
Paternity leave
Along with maternity leaves, firms now also allow paternity leaves. It is to encourage fathers to take care of the newly mother in this crucial time. Thanks to Facebook that helped in raising such good initiative. The leave type varies from company to company. In the US, some companies even allow up to 17 weeks of paid paternity leave.
Bereavement leave
Companies should focus in valuing the employees’ emotions too. Bereavement leave allows employees to take a week (minimum) leave for the death of a close family member. By being emphatic, companies can increase employee morale and receive better output from them.
Roll-over leaves
Sometimes employees work more than their usual leaves. Where every employee has some fixed leaves, some just do their work without hesitation. As they are providing value to the company, they deserve to get a little sensitivity. In other words, companies can issue roll-over leaves for these employees.
Sabbaticals
It’s hard to continue job at a stretch. To retain work life refreshments, companies offer sabbaticals to employees. This type of leave allows an employee to take a long-term vacation.
Structure all these leaves on a week or monthly basis. It will help you to build up a strong engaging management style.
Now, let’s move on to the real deals!
Build a Requisition Form
First of all, let’s be clear what a requisition form is. A requisition form is a document that describes the type of leave an employee wants to take.
Here, you must include the purpose of the leave clearly. Ask your employee to provide details on his vacation and rejoining date.
This form will work as a record for the employee’s performance. Also, it can help you to dictate work availability for other employees.
To sum up, maintain a requisition form to be updates on when and why your employee is taking a leave.
Grant Leave Approvals to the Eligible Candidates
Let’s be honest. It’s not possible to provide leaves whenever an employee wants. As the authority you must check if an employee is meeting all the criteria to take a leave.
Here’s when you evaluate the requisition form, we discussed about earlier. Smaller organizations can authorize about this matter with the help of only 1-2 HR professionals. On the contrary, larger organizations should set up an approval authority for expediting the process.
You can also keep records using an employee leave tracker app. It will cut your budget and time in case of leave approvals.
You might have noticed the tech talk a couple of times by now. It’s because we think, incorporating technology to your business can smoothen all your work. Keeping this in mind, we will show you some tracking systems to speed up your leave management techniques.
Incorporate Tracking Technologies for Leave Management
A leave tracker is efficient in maintaining leave policies. There are a lot of tracking software which will allow you to document every information regarding leaves.
Use a vacation tracker when your employees seek long-term vacations. In this case, we recommend for the free vacation tracker to cut the budget. It is mostly useful for small businesses.
Try keeping a PTO tracking software to ease Paid Time Offs. Day Off has a wonderful PTO tracker tool that helps both the employees and HR professionals.
Want to know how? Let us walk you through the path in short.
- As an HR, you first have to download the app
- Invite all of your employees
- Provide proper guidelines on how employees can request Time Off and vacations
- Evaluate the requests. Make sure direct managers are also involved
- View all the reports and balance workflow accordingly
Remember, Paid Time Off is only for those countries that support the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Example: The USA.
Similarly, an employee time off tracker measures the requested leaves. It analyzes employee salaries and appraisals to properly evaluate time off.
Set the Right Guidelines for Your Employees
The effectiveness of your leave management techniques depends on the application. You might have several brilliant technologies to support you. What if your employees are not quite clear how to use them?
Suppose, even if they know how to use them, they are using for personal benefits. They pull out the loop holes which directly affects your revenue. This will be huge threat to your business.
That’s why, it’s important to set industry level guidelines. You must research the industry norms and then devise a policy.
The policy must be flexible for employees to increase employee retention. But it can’t be something that jeopardizes your business.
So, in order to devise a guideline, you must keep in mind the following rules.
- Guidelines must be bold and straightforward
- Cut off any ambiguous word from the guide
- Prepared well-organized documents and circulate among all employees
- Define the culture, location, location, ethnicity, and diversity of the company in detail
- Input all the eligibility criteria to take a leave
- Ensure transparency among the employer and employees
Final Words
In summary, using different types of leave management tools can help you to be ahead of the game. You manage your employees well and also save yourself precious time. We encourage applying the techniques above for better results. Only your strategic gestures can bring success to the business.