COVID-19 Changed Employee Leave. How Does Your Company Manage Absences in the Wake of the Pandemic?
The COVID-19 virus hit the US in early 2019, resulting in drastic shifts in the national workforce. Healthcare professionals, business owners, and employers were forced to respond quickly to new regulations that affect how employers manage employee absences. As a result, businesses faced employee leave disruptions ranging from full-day school closures, early dismissals, and postponement of clinics due to high staff absenteeism.?
While businesses did their best to remain open to serve customers, they also had to abide by the paid leave laws. Employers had to comply with a slew of new federal and state paid leave legislation, most notably the Families First Coronavirus Act, that addressed the need for employees to take leave for the illness, school closures, and other COVID-19 related disruptions.
Bottom line, COVID-19 was causing pain then and now, and the threat of disruption for businesses has not entirely dissipated. With the Delta variant and other threats, you must be prepared to manage interruptions, extended absences, and new compliance laws.?
Here’s a blog to help employers deal with the chaos caused by this virus and prevent further disruptions from employee leave policies.
Consequences of not having a plan in place.
First, let’s look at why an Absence Management Plan, and the right tools to support it, is so important! Having an absence plan in place is vital for all businesses because it can help reduce your financial losses due to unexpected absences among staff members. Unfortunately, although most employers do carry out absence planning these days, there are still many who fail to do so. As a result, they could risk facing the consequences from the government.
If a staff member becomes sick or injured and cannot work, business owners must make sure that they do not unlawfully discriminate against them when it comes to reporting the absence and pay of the employee.?
If a member of your staff becomes sick with Covid-19, you must report the symptoms, time of the report, and quarantine status to local and regional health departments depending on the size of your company.?
The US has seen the Family Medical Leave Act, Affordable Care Act, and the Centers for Disease Control Ergonomics take effect. In addition, in some states, organizations must bear 12 weeks of unpaid leave to their employees on Covid leave. These latest updates are especially relevant for Covid-19 covered entities focused on keeping their employee workforce healthy.?
You must be prepared for these situations and understand the laws that your company is governed by. Otherwise, you could get fines, lose money, or worse, be stuck without any employees to support your business.
Be proactive, anticipate and take action!
Effective disaster planning is critical to handling mandatory COVID-19 leave. And that means being prepared for the worst, including an influx of new employees filing COVID-19 related leaves. While it may be easier to handle the situation if only a handful of employees take leave, conservative estimates suggest that nearly one in three workers will be directly or indirectly affected by the virus. This could mean a large portion of your workforce is out or on quarantine. Not to mention, given the growth of the remote workforce and the new realities surrounding employee leave, you must evaluate and adjust your leave policies and procedures.?
The issue of absenteeism is only getting bigger. Here are some tips to staying proactive:
Evaluate your policies.
The positive impact of having an established employee leave plan in place not only helps your business avoid fines for violations but also supports the health and well-being of your employees.?
You don’t want your employees faced with a dilemma when they become ill or are exposed to COVID-19. They may feel that their job security is jeopardized by taking time off work to receive medical treatment or to get healthy enough to return to the workplace. But, then, come in to work with a contagious disease.
Overall, account for all the details of new laws, but stay focussed on promoting a healthy environment for your team to come to work.?
Understand your trends to see into the future.
Absenteeism can be hard to quantify. However, by better understanding your trends, you can plan accordingly and prepare for the predictable, so you’re not unprepared when a circumstance arises. So here are some key questions you want to answer in real-time and with long-term trend tracking.
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These are just a few of the questions that you could answer with absenteeism trending. With this information, you’ll be able to inform your decisions with data and plan for staffing needs. In addition, the ability to proactively manage a business process like absenteeism instead of only reacting when there’s an issue can benefit both your business and your employees.
Consider integrations to make the process more seamless.
Sometimes it seems like human resources departments are responsible for a countless number of responsibilities. For example, the functions of an HR department include recruitment, training, and development, compensation and benefits, organizational structures, risk management, corporate culture, diversity, employee relations, outsourcing, employee benefits administration, employee assistance programs (EAPs), performance management systems (PMS), discipline and dismissal, etc. Oh, and also, they are responsible for acting as a liaison between management and employees. Thus, HR plays an essential role in the success of the business.
What if I told you that a solution could save the HR department 20hrs/wk while providing back-up and working within your existing system? I think you would say, “yes please!”?
Technologies empower your business using integrations and APIs to build out seamless connectivity. For example, instead of assigning a specialist to your company leave and absences, you can use a phone line that automatically alerts supervisors, connects to your existing systems, and sends confirmations of requests to your employees.?
Explore new technology.
It’s time to toss out your voicemail. It’s not just slowing down your business but also weakening employee-to-employee communication and data records. You can now turn to cutting-edge attendance tracking software like Attendance Bridge with call-out hotlines, mobile confirmation messaging, and SMS/email absence alerting for businesses to improve companywide communication practices.?
Modern organizations need to use technology to deliver better and better performance. However, it is more complicated than just selecting technology and pressing play. There is integration, implementation, and optimization. Abridged Tech offers a consultative approach to get you to walk your entire organization through the entire absence management process step-by-step. Also, our tools and solutions integrate with your existing software and process to avoid the headache of switching between platforms.
Covid-19 absence management must be handled by professionals with professional tools to ensure that your business remains compliant and can stay ahead of absenteeism issues and concerns. In addition, utilizing technology to manage the absence process provides that you are always covered.??
Centralized systems make compliance much easier.
Outsourcing absence management processes at separate facilities to centralize data, alleviate compliance concerns, and ensure data storage are not uncommon. This centralized approach reduces operational complexities, improves application accuracy for retention and hiring, and ultimately makes it easier to collect accurate call data from end-users.
Not to mention a variety of other reasons for managing absences in one central outsourced location like:?
Employers are under increased scrutiny for managing workers’ compensation claims, Covid-19 absences, and attendance in general. Unfortunately, many who are not accustomed to handling such claims and administering other elements of a benefits package do not know where to begin. Attendance Bridge offers a solution that is easy to use, easy to set up, and easy to manage.?
Alerting and reporting with secure data storage.
Security and the prevention of identity theft top the list of concerns among employees. Additionally, there is a lack of trust in enterprise data storage, affecting how employees respond to leave requests. Happily, automated communications through self-service web portals and mobile devices can help to address this critical issue. This is because employees can access when and where they choose while creating a paper trail for their leave records.
The ultimate allure of HR and workforce management technology is to simplify and streamline an employee’s experience. But, first, it’s critical to empower employees to use the leave process on their terms, particularly for employers with mobile-heavy workforces who want to increase worker engagement.
As more and more companies break free from restrictive, manual processes and adopt cutting-edge technology, HR professionals are transforming the leave of absence (LOA) process to meet the needs of today’s employees. In addition, many HR professionals are becoming aware of the costs, frustration, and lost productivity of manual processes. Self-service leave management allows employees to manage time off without having to file separate paperwork. This approach also ensures that all employees can quickly submit information to their employer at any time, any place.
The Attendance Bridge offers a hotline for your team to call in whenever they want to request leave, report an absence or tardiness, or request PTO.? After supervisors approve every request, the employee receives a text confirmation.? You can also set up alerts via email. Contact me to learn more about our cutting-edge attendance tracking systems!