Creating a Painless Paid Time Off Process Starts Here
You know your team needs paid time off, but implementing a pto tracking system can be painful. Developing policies that are consistent with your competitors’ and in compliance with constantly changing laws isn’t easy. Tracking accruals and keeping balances up-to-date is even harder.
When you have vague policies – or no policies – and a manual PTO tracking system in place, you rarely know who is out of the office and why. All you have is an empty desk or an unfilled spot in your workflow. Worse still, when staff requests get overlooked or misplaced, you have an employee relations disaster on your hands.
This series will walk you through the process of designing and implementing a PTO system that works – and as a bonus, you can throw out all of those PTO tracking spreadsheets for good.
What’s Wrong with PTO Tracking Spreadsheets?
Not convinced that you need a comprehensive PTO tracking system? Consider these scenarios. If they aren’t already happening in your business, it’s just a matter of time.
The Monday Flu Victim
You don’t have a policy around paid sick time – you count on your team to make smart decisions. One employee is out every Monday, which means extra work for everyone else. Managers aren’t comfortable addressing the issue because there is no standard practice around which absences are paid. The problem drags on… and on… and on… while the rest of your team gets increasingly frustrated.
A standardized sick time or paid time off policy limits the amount of paid sick time each employee accrues. That one employee is far less likely to call off each Monday once those missed shifts go unpaid.
The Super Spreader
Meanwhile, another employee comes to work no matter what – colds, flu, and stomach bugs don’t get in the way of getting the job done. Whether and how sick days are paid is a mystery, and this person doesn’t want to risk lost wages.
The problem is that those germs spread throughout the building, and everyone else gets sick. Suddenly, your company is a ghost town, and you have lots of angry clients.
Clear time off policies assure your team members that in the case of illness, they won’t lose pay. This is critical to keeping sick employees home for the health and safety of the rest of your staff.
The Messy Desk
When you rely on verbal requests, sticky notes, and voicemails to track time off requests, something is sure to be overlooked or misplaced. All of a sudden, you have an employee who is irate – no one ever approved the time off for a family wedding, and it’s coming up fast.
Sure, you can apologize, approve the time off, and get the employee calmed down, but it’s one more crisis your management team can do without.
An automated time off tracker and approval system ensures nothing is ever misplaced. That means an end to deleted voicemails, lost sticky notes and forgotten verbal requests.
The Exhausted HR Manager
Keeping employees happy is a huge job, and your HR staff is already operating at full speed. When time off accruals and balances are kept in spreadsheets, they have to spend hours manually entering data. An error? A typo? It feels like the end of the world. All those calculations have to be deleted and redone.
Automated PTO tracking eliminates the need for all that data entry. It’s a self-service system that has calculations built-in. Your HR staff will thank you.
Convinced Your Paid Time Off Process Needs Some Tweaking?
If you are convinced that your time off process needs some work, check out our next installment:
If you can’t wait for the next installment – or you want more detail – we have good news. The full Comprehensive Guide to Implementing a PTO System is available for download today.
