Being one of his time's brightest minds, Benjamin Franklin, born in 1785, has enriched the world with multiple ideas and inventions. From electricity to political philosophy, his interests seem to dwarf one of the key concepts that transform today’s world - productivity.
Benjamin Franklin used to follow a strict hourly schedule and make to-do lists, all way before the era of internet productivity gurus. Chased by time, Benjamin Franklin was fully aware that he had only a limited amount of hours in his life to follow all his bright ideas and pursue his goals.
Over two centuries later, armed with smartphones and apps of all kinds, we still fight with uneasy odds to boost productivity - both personal and organizational.
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Benjamin Franklin used to start his day every 5 a.m. and ask himself “What good shall I do this day”. Later, his day was divided into time blocked for work, meals, and daily chores, ending every day at 9 p.m. when he asked himself “what good have I done today?”.
While a polymath and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States would probably answer this question easily, a typical employee at 2022 struggles to do so oftentimes. According to the Zippia study, an average worker is productive for no more than 2 hours and 53 minutes every 8-hour working day.
This is seen by the employee and the employer alike, with only 7% of employees feeling productive in their workplace. Also, employees tend to spend up to 32% of their daily time on Facebook, costing their employers up to $28 billion each year.
Spending one hour in three working hours on Facebook rarely can be considered a “good thing done today”.
Productive companies enjoy up to 50% higher operating margins than their less productive competition. The research shows that the market leaders are 40% more productive on average than the rest of the market.
Also, the Covid and war-related crises encourage companies around the world to reduce spending and increase income due to the harsh times incoming. Boosting productivity by optimization is one of the key methods to do so, especially if it can be done with little to no spending.
Project management and all the productivity industry come with many answers - from simple to-do lists to the Getting Things Done approach. The productivity software market was worth 41.90 Billion USD in 2020 and is estimated to grow to 122.70 billion USD by 2028.
Yet there are many hidden ways to boost productivity today, with smart and conscious absence management being one of them.
Boosting productivity without the absence management system in place is impossible. Without it, the sole process of managing the leaves is a burden that can be overwhelming for a company.
According to a DMEC survey quoted by Calamari, an average company needs to employ one (up to three) full-time employees to handle the leaves. The biggest companies surveyed (with a headcount of over 20 thousand) need to employ 10 full-time specialists or more to handle the leaves only. The process of handling the leaves is dull and full of paperwork - a perfect candidate to be automated using a software solution like Calamari.
No matter how small (or how big) the company is, the absences are unavoidable. Currently, there are multiple types of leave to process and handle in a compliant and responsible way, including:
The leave management system forces the order and compliance in the leaves one would like to take. These are good reasons to implement the leave management system on their own. But the productivity boosts are what we are here for, right?
The absences, either unplanned or poorly planned, can wreak havoc on the company’s plans and goals. “Wreaking havoc” is always about dropping productivity - but on the flip side, when done properly, the absence of management comes with significant boosts.
Self-service of the employee is when one can do nearly all the process of the leave without engaging anyone else. With a proper UX delivered by an app like Calamari, all the processes can be smooth and seamless.
The employee needs to request leave using either a paper document or an email. The processing is done manually, consuming time and costing the effort of multiple employees, including the one who requests, the approvers who are bothered, and the leave specialist, who manages the process. Also, there is no automated way to check how many leave days there are and every such inquiry needs to be handled by the HR specialist.
The software solution like Calamari comes with a publicly available leave calendar that includes the upcoming leaves as well as the information about the current status - be that an unplanned sick leave or canceling the leave that was to be taken.
The traditional (and unluckily - still common) approach to leaves is that the supervisor, the employee, and the HR specialist know when one has a planned vacation or any other leave. Yet none of them has a full scope on the planned leaves, assuming the team is either big or distributed and decentralized.
By that, there can be multiple surprises on the way. For example, the employee can be engaged in multiple teams, with only one supervisor informed, or the team can just forget about the early-announced leave and mismanage the upcoming work.
Hybrid work, widely introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, is one of the greatest game-changers when it comes to employee productivity. Letting the employee work from home can lead to a 13% of productivity boost without literally anything else. On the other hand, though, the leaves combined with hybrid work can result in greater chaos.
When hybrid work is discouraged (or even prohibited) all the workplace-related disturbances are present. Also, being present in the workplace makes any disturbance like slight sickness or worse mood encouraging to take leave.
Modern software like Calamari comes with many interesting integrations with popular business apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, and Basecamp. This enables one to work in the way he or she finds the most comfortable and convenient.
The traditional way of taking a leave of absence is a standalone process with its own channels. Requests are processed independently and there are little to no ways to make it smoother or more efficient.
Having a centralized and up-to-date system that stores the absence-related data enables the company to run some analytics in it. This data comes with great potential, ranging from spotting early signs of employee burnout and absenteeism to hints about new benefits or policies that would boost employee satisfaction.
In the traditional approach, the leave processing is either done offline or stored in a non-actionable format, for example as emails and prints. The whole “analytics” is done only if the HR specialist spots something on-the-go or recalls it from memory.
When the data is stored in an actionable way, there are many ways to automate processes. The dull and repetitive work is handled by the machines to free the resources and creativity of human employees.
In paper-based or email-based leave management, there are no ways of automation. All tasks need to be done manually by the leave management specialist. This costs time and effort and prevents one from doing more crucial tasks.
A system is only a tool - nothing more and nothing less. To make it work properly it needs a culture of transparency which is the key aspect of the leave management that delivers the results.
The non-digital leave requests deliver multiple occasions for arbitrary and unsupervised decisions or even abuses. Only the HR team knows who and when can or cannot take a leave.
Leave management is like a hidden web in the organization, having joints and strings in multiple places. At first glance, there are little to no connections between the issues described above, yet all they have in common is proper (or not proper) leave management.
If you wish to talk more about boosting productivity by applying better leave management, don’t hesitate to contact us now!
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