leavetrack-blog

[leavetrack-blog]

Saturday Stories for 30 September

The Ryanair saga continues. This from the BBC

Ambulance staff demand end to 'unfair' refusals of annual leave - Gazette & Herald

Can an employee be too sick to take holiday? - People Management

At Salesforce Singapore, workers get 7 days of volunteer leave every year - Channel News Asia

Unions and management are both working hard to reduce levels of sickness in the Civil Service - Belfast Telegraph

Workforce management market to develop in coming years due to employee engagement illuminated by new report - Whatech

Paying PTO Forward - HR Executive Online

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Saturday Stories for 23 September 2017

An exciting week for those of us in the absence management space with lots of stories about the Ryanair fiasco. We’ll link to this one:

Ryanair’s flight cancellations highlight that businesses must take staff holiday planning seriously - HR News

Apply These 5 Techniques to Help Employees Return to Work After a Medical Absence - Small Business Trends

Staff rotas face tech revolution - BBC

Work-life balance makes contractors satisfied with their annual leave - Crystal Umbrella

One in five North East ambulance staff took stress-related sick days - Chronicle Live

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Saturday Stories for 16 September 2017

Reaping the benefits of a focus on wellbeing - Financial Times

Managing staff: how to make it work for everyone - SME Web

Holiday legislation 'too complicated' - Radio NZ

IKEA’s month-long paternity leave a shining example to be followed - Channel News Asia

Legal Insider: Leave for Virginia Employees - ARL Now

Absenteeism vs. presenteeism – which is worse for the remaining staff? - Real Business

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Tracking time off under the New York State Paid Family Leave law

The New York State Department of Labor has finalised the regulations accompanying the New York Paid Family Leave Benefits Law (“PFL Law”). Although the law becomes effective on January 1, 2018, putting in place the right processes to manage it is critical. With its high-level of customisability, Leavetrack can help your organisation manage compliance with the PFL Law.

The official employer fact sheet sets out the benefits you must secure for your employees, which will phase in over four years. During year one, qualifying employees will be entitled to 8 weeks’ leave, rising to 12 weeks by year four.

For each employee in Leavetrack, you can define the start date of their employment. With employees only qualifying for benefits after 26 weeks of employment, you can easily track which employees qualify for PFL benefits.

The ability to fully customise available leave types means you can track leave taken under the PFL law.

Our easy-to-use reporting allows you to see instantly what level of absence has been taken under any particular category ensuring compliance for your organisation.

We’d be happy to help your organisation manage compliance with the PFL Law so reach out and let’s talk about what we can do together.

Leavetrack is the simple way to track and plan for staff leave and other time off. With straightforward pricing from £13 per month for up to 100 active employees, it’s used by companies with 15 employees and those with 250.

[leavetrack-blog]

Saturday Stories for 9 September

Sick Derby City Council employees are costing taxpayers millions of pounds each year - Derby Telegraph

Low-paid workers penalised over flexible work requests - Staffing Industry Analysts

Keeping track of voluntary overtime is key to getting holiday pay correct - Belfast Telegraph

Regulations Under the New York State Paid Family Leave Benefits Law Take Effect - National Law Review

How to get on the front foot with long-term sickness absence - People Management

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Saturday Stories for 2 September

Artificial Intelligence: An effective tool to increase employee engagement and make organisations more efficient - Financial Express

Should Highland Council staff get day off work after election night slog? - Ross-shire Journal

UK's low-paid workers 'penalised for taking children to hospital' - The Guardian

When To Take Annual Leave In 2018 To Get The Most Days Off Work - HuffPost UK

9 out of 10 Brits pass up on £650 of paid annual leave a year - Business Matters

One NT public servant entitled to nearly four years on paid holiday - The Mandarin

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Saturday Stories for 26 August 2017

Vacation can you make you more productive - CNBC

Automate These 4 Business Tasks Before Going On Vacation - entrepreneur.com

'Lack of publicity' leaves GPs unaware of government's Fit for Work scheme - gponline.com

Reinventing human resources at the workplace - IT Pro Portal

Four Tips For Improving Employer-Employee Relationships Through Technology - Forbes

Absence rates on the rise - Personnel Today

Leavetrack helps you track employee absence and paid time off. Starting from £13 per month for up to 100 active employees, it’s the cost effective way to be on top of your staff absence. We are used by companies with 15 employees and companies with 250 so we have a solution for you.

[leavetrack-blog]

Updates to Leavetrack

Here are some new things we’ve launched in the past couple of weeks.

Quick search

Using the search box in the navigation bar, you can now quickly find an employee and jump straight to their record rather than navigate to them by Account > Employees, find their name in the list...

This is an example of a request from a customer which was implemented within a couple of days so if you have suggestions for Leavetrack, get in touch.

Holiday Entitlement Summary

We’ve added a new report showing a quick summary of your employees’ holiday or PTO entitlements, the days they have booked and the days approved for the current leave year.

Employee Reports

Coming soon, new individual reports for each employee showing a summary of their time off across months and across categories. This is in trial with a couple of customers at the moment and will be launched to all customers very soon!

Currently in development

We shared this on Twitter this week, but a new look is coming to Leavetrack and we can’t wait to get this finished and launched to you all.

Also, and finally, amendments to holiday requests are coming. This is our most-requested feature and one that is taking some time as we work out the best defaults to implement for what can be changed and when. As an example, should we allow changes to be made after the request for holiday is created but before the manager has approved it?

Leavetrack is the simple way to track and plan for staff leave and other time off. With straightforward pricing from £13 per month for up to 100 active employees, it’s used by companies with 15 employees and those with 250.

[leavetrack-blog]

Saturday Stories for 19 August 2017

Every Saturday we take a look at what stories have made the news in the past week relating to HR, absence management and all things related to time off for your staff.

The failure to properly communicate employee benefits is having a detrimental effect on staff turnover and sickness absence - FT Adviser

Stressed NHS staff have taken more than 1.3 million hours off work in the last six years - Evening Telegraph

Voluntary overtime should be taken into account when calculating payments for paid annual leave - Employee Benefits

Five ways to improve workforce productivity, including the use of absence management technology - Real Business

Trend of converging working time across 28 EU Member States has stalled - Eurofound

The Etiquette Of How To Write An Out-Of-Office Message - Vogue

HR technology aids Success of Small Firms - HR Technologist

Czech Republic: Practical Impacts of the Amendment to the Labour Code 2017 - Lexology

Leavetrack helps you track employee absence and paid time off. Starting from £13 per month for up to 100 active employees, it’s the cost effective way to be on top of your staff absence. We are used by companies with 15 employees and companies with 250 so we have a solution for you.

[leavetrack-blog]

Saturday Stories

Every Saturday we take a look at what stories have made the news in the past week relating to HR and absence management.

A new report from Spherion Staffing reveals that 41% of US workers would prefer more paid vacation time over a pay rise - HRM Asia

Unsurprisingly, given the above report, the US is officially the worst country in the world for paid time off for leave - HR News

In Ontario, there is a plan to increase paid time off to three weeks from the current two weeks - Personnel Today

HR Holiday Hotspots: guidance on how to deal with issues arising from multiple employees wanting to take holiday at the same time - CIPD

And finally, Hang Seng Bank employees receive more vacation time following strong company performance. A novel incentive - South China Morning Post

Leavetrack helps you track employee absence and paid time off. Starting from £13 per month for up to 100 active employees, it’s the cost effective way to be on top of your staff absence.

[leavetrack-blog]

A few updates to Leavetrack

As Leavetrack continues to grow, I’m addressing some of those customer situations which don’t happen too often and don’t take me too long to deal with on the back-end. This will enable my customers to have more control over their own system and better manage that paid time off.

Firstly, adding new holiday years. Customers can now add the next holiday year in their sequence and doing so will create holiday entitlements for all employees for that year. What I have noticed is that some employees really book next year’s holiday well in advance meaning I was adding new holiday years in the June or July of the current one. This change allows the customers who use Leavetrack to update it when best for them.

Secondly, editing public holidays. Maybe you made an error when entering it or you want to change the description or your local Council has declared Christmas Day to only be a morning thing! You can now edit the holiday information and when you do, all relevant absences will be updated.

Only some small changes but ones that will make Leavetrack just a little nicer to use for customers.

[leavetrack-blog]

Being Human

Absence Management.

In those two words, the focus is predominantly placed on absence. What is the reason? How long will he be off work? How will we handle the work while she is away?

The key to successful absence management is to focus on the management part. And to do that well, means being human.

What do I mean by being human? I mean moving away from HR connotations and considerations as to what a certain action might mean later in “the process”.

Treating colleagues and employees as human and being human is the key to successful managing staff absences.

I am sometimes asked how to deal with complaints and my first response is “be human”. Listen to what the complainant says. Put yourself in their position and understand why they feel the way they do.

The same is true for managing staff absence. Most people want to be at work. Being on sick leave, let along long-term sick leave, is not fun. So when dealing with it, empathise with the employee. Try and understand how frustrating it must be for them. How difficult it must be.

Yes, there is the possibility that long-term sickness absence might require formal disciplinary action at some point in the future. But, members of the HR community will know that the key thing is fairness. Fairness in the process.

Going through a formal process for the sake of it runs the risk of being perceived by the employee as unfair. Being human, and working with a colleague who is on sick leave with a clear view to having them return to work is more likely to result in them perceiving the process to be fair. As you empathise with them as regards their position, so they are more likely to empathise with yours.

This means a better outcome for all concerned, irrespective of what that outcome is.

Be Human and focus on the management, not the absence.

[leavetrack-blog]

Five factors to consider when choosing an absence management system

Here at Leavetrack, we tend to see a very seasonal peak in website visitors during December and January when companies start looking for a better way to manage staff absence. Perhaps they have been using Excel to manage staff holidays or for smaller companies a wall planner but there comes a time when it just takes too much time!

Choosing an absence management system isn’t the most business-critical decision but getting it right can help drive a frictionless implementation and acceptance by your employees. So we think it’s important to start looking well in advance and here are the top five factors to consider.

1. Giving managers the right information

The purpose of introducing an absence management system is to reduce administrative burden so it’s vital that any absence management tool gives managers the information they need to make an informed and timely decision. Look for systems that tell managers who is off at the same time and allow managers to approve and reject requests from the email notification.

2. Easy administration

Someone has to keep the system up to date and that normally means someone spending a lot of time in it. You need to make sure that it is straightforward to use from an administrative perspective. Check how happy the provider is to make small tweaks to improve usage.

3. Simple and clear reports

The reporting should be clear and easy to use. Make sure that you can get the information that you need, whether that is across the whole company or down to the individual. Does the provider offer a variety of reports that allow you to spot trends in your company? As an example, are your employees clustering their holidays meaning certain departments are short-staffed?

4. Integration with existing systems

What integration options does the absence management system offer? Does it directly integrate with other systems you use at work already? Perhaps you are a fan of Slack and would like to receive notifications in channel. Also look at what calendar feeds the product offers so that you can feed information directly into employee or shared calendars.

5. A product that scales with your business

What pricing does the product offer? Is it per person? That might work out cheap if your company is 10-15 people but what if you grow to 50? Make sure that the pricing is scalable or check that you can get your data out should you choose to move in the future.

There are a lot of options out there and it’s vital to trial the software and speak to the companies involved to ensure they meet the requirements of your business. As always, we’d be happy if you considered Leavetrack and if we don’t think we are a good fit for your company, we’ll be pleased to suggest alternative providers who might be.

[leavetrack-blog]

How to Manage Sickness Absence

An estimated 137.3 million working days were lost due to sickness or injury in the UK in 2016. This number has fallen over the past 25 years from a high of 7.2 days per worker.

The cost to the UK economy as a result of sickness is estimated to be in the region of £16 billion per year.

These numbers demonstrate that sickness absence has a real effect on performance and productivity and every business will be acutely aware of the detrimental effect that sickness absence has on both company performance and other members of staff.

That isn’t to suggest that all employees are malingerers but it is vital for company success to properly manage sickness absence and to be clear around what is and is not acceptable.

Being Sick is OK

It is critical for companies to ensure that their employees understand that being sick is OK. And not coming to work when sick is also OK. “Struggling through” is likely to exacerbate the situation by spreading sickness amongst colleagues leading to bigger problems.

If employees understand that they can take time off to get better, this is likely to minimise disruption and reduce the likelihood that those illnesses will spread.

Having said that, you must ensure that this is consistently applied throughout your organisation. It is of no use having one manager adopt this approach yet have another manager instil a culture of presenteeism at all costs. A sickness policy will help achieve this aim.

When an employee calls in sick

Your managers need to be aware of the various issues which affect the way in which they deal with an employee reporting in sick.

Your line managers will normally be the initial point of contact. Nevertheless, whoever is the point of contact for employees off sick should receive appropriate training in their responsibilities for recording the absence. Key to this training should be the requirement to “be human”. It is possible to have a well-managed sickness absence process and deal empathetically with employees who are unwell.

In most cases it will be appropriate to identify the reason for the absence and the likely date of return. For example, an absence due to a cold or flu will be likely to last only a few days and may be an isolated occurrence, but if a particular employee is frequently off work due to colds there may be some underlying cause which has not yet been identified. In this latter case, properly tracking the absences and the reason will allow for trends to be identified. Most HR management systems will allow you to do this or you may want to use a more dedicated piece of software.

How to manage an employee who is off sick

It is important to maintain regular contact with employees who are on sick leave. This is about managing sickness absence, not about letting it go unchecked for a long period of time. Employees are less likely to take advantage where they feel that their absence will be effectively managed.

Regular means as is appropriate for the situation and the company. If it is anticipated that the worker will be absent for a number of months, regular check-ins every 2 weeks may be acceptable. Similarly, if the absence is only likely to be for a few days, there may be no need for contact after the first report.

You should be careful to avoid the appearance of pressuring the employee to return to work or asking them to become too involved in workplace matters. This is one of those times that having solid business continuity plans really helps. Can you manage if your Finance Manager is ill for a couple of months?

Contact with the employee should be documented and minutes of conversations kept. Similarly, the software you use to manage employee absence should be kept up to date. In the event that there is a later need to discipline or dismiss the employee, you will need the basis on which those decisions are made to be solid.

What to do when the employee returns to work

Return to work interviews are a vital tool in managing sickness absence. They do not need to last long but even a return to work interview of a few minutes is shown to be a disincentive to taking sick leave when not really sick. On a practical note, the interviews can also help accommodate the worker back into the workforce particularly if their illness requires any particular adjustments to be made. The interview can be the place where those are discussed and agreed.

Managing when sickness absence become a problem

Most absence issues can be managed on an informal basis. Informal does not mean “without records” but rather without the need to engage in formal disciplinary procedures. Dismissal for reasons of capability is a lawful means of terminating employment and if the absences of an employee are such that they are potentially incapable of performing their duties, formal steps will need to be taken. In most cases, this will be where the absence or series of absences is having a detrimental effect on functional performance.

If your organisation is considering disciplinary action on the grounds of capability, it is vital that a fair procedure is followed which affords the employee the opportunity to make their case. Even if you have the clearest reasons, failure to follow a fair procedure is likely to result in a successful claim from the employee. I would recommend in all cases that you take specific legal advice on your particular situation.

Broadly speaking, the first formal meeting should be preceded by a written invitation and notification to the employee that they may be accompanied to the meeting. The meeting should explore the nature of the absence(s) and the reasons therefore. It should explore whether or not anything in the job or work environment is contributing to or causing the absences and if this is the case what practical steps may be taken to eliminate or mitigate their absence.

If there is no improvement, it would be necessary to hold a second meeting, again to which the employee may be accompanied. In each case, the outcome of the meeting must be reasonable and fair in the circumstances. If the employee has frequent, short-term absences without reasonable explanation, a final warning may be appropriate. For a longer-term absence supported by medical evidence, consideration may need to be given to alternative employment or reasonable adjustments that might be made to the workplace.

Summary

I would recommend firstly that you obtain specific advice if you are considering dismissal of an employee with more than two years’ service or where you think the illness may constitute a disability. The key takeaway when managing sickness absence is to “be human”. Being empathetic and treating the employee how you would like to be treated is likely to achieve your goals but don’t be afraid to challenge and question if you feel the sickness absence is not genuine.

[leavetrack-blog]

Leavetrack ❤ Slack

I’m happy to announce the release of Leavetrack’s integration with Slack.

Slack is “where work happens” and used globally to enable teams to better communicate. Our integration with Slack has two parts. Firstly...

Single Sign On

You can use your Slack account to sign into Leavetrack. If you’ve not created an account, clicking the “Sign in with Slack” button will create an account in Leavetrack for your organisation and you. Anyone else from your Slack team who signs in will automatically be added to your Leavetrack account. And secondly...

Leavetrack Bot

Well, kind of. Any absence request created in Leavetrack will be posted via direct message to the manager of the person creating the request.

And, with a click of the button, the manager can approve or reject the request straight from Slack.

In addition, Leavetrack will post a daily summary of who’s off to one of your Slack channels.

I’m very happy with this addition to Leavetrack and hope that you find it useful too.

[leavetrack-blog]

Sickness Heatmap

Do you ever get the niggling feeling that employees are always sick on the Tuesday after a bank holiday? With Leavetrack’s new Sickness Heatmap, you can now answer that question.

Our new heatmap overlays all the sickness absence in your organisation and the more absence that occurs on a particular day, the darker the colour.

We think heatmaps are a really great way to quickly spot trends in your organisation and we will be launching additional heatmaps in the coming weeks.

[leavetrack-blog]

Adding referrals to a Rails app using Stripe

Hi.

It's been a while.

I want to talk about adding a referral program to a Rails app when using Stripe. One of the ways to grow your online business is to reward existing customers for referring new customers. People buy from other people. Right?

Leavetrack uses Stripe to handle subscriptions and I wanted to implement a scheme where existing customers could, when they added their card details, enter a referral code so the referring account would receive a credit. Pretty straightforward, one referral gets 10% off, two referrals gets 20% off, to a maximum of 50% off the monthly subscription.

There are some commercial solutions out there but I think this is fairly trivial to implement for the scope I have.

The first step is to create a migration to add a referral code to each account.

class AddReferralCodeToAccount < ActiveRecord::Migration def change add_column :accounts, :referral_code, :string, null: false, unique: true Account.all.each do |account| account.update_attribute(:referral_code, SecureRandom.hex(3)) end end end

Follow this by creating a model to hold referrals, Referral. This will have the id of the referring account, the id of the referred account and the referral code used. Leavetrack allows trials without providing credit card information, so I know I will create a referral in the database when an account provides its credit card details i.e. I know they have signed up to a paying account.

class CreateReferrals < ActiveRecord::Migration def change create_table :referrals do |t| t.integer :referred_account_id, null: false t.integer :referring_account_id, null: false t.string :referral_code, null: false t.timestamps end end end

Now we have the right model set up, it's time to look at how we record the referral. Leavetrack has an update_card method which is used to pass card parameters to Stripe. What we will do is hook into this so that when a card is added, the referral is created:

def create_referral Referral.create( referred_account_id: @current_account.id, referring_account_id: @referring_account.id, referral_code: @referral_code ) ApplyCoupon.call(@referring_account.id) end

That final line is what we use to apply the coupon to the account of the referrer. I am a believer in moving anything that interacts with an external service to outside of the controller and model and into a service object.

class ApplyCoupon def self.call(referring_account_id) referral_hash = { 1 => "ten", 2 => "twenty", 3 => "thirty", 4 => "forty", 5 => "fifty" } begin referring_account = Account.find(referring_account_id) referrals = Referral.where(referring_account_id: referring_account.id).where(referral_code: referring_account.referral_code) if referrals.length > 0 customer = Stripe::Customer.retrieve(referring_account.stripe_customer_reference) subscription = customer.subscriptions.retrieve(referring_account.stripe_subscription.stripe_subscription_reference) referrals_count = referrals.length > 5 ? 5 : referrals.length subscription.coupon = referral_hash[referrals_count] subscription.save else Rails.logger.debug { "Apply Coupon - #donothing - #{referring_account_id}" } end rescue => e Rails.logger.debug { "#{e.inspect}" } end return [subscription, {success: true}] end end

As noted at the start, the number of referrals determines the percentage reduction so we define a hash mapping the referral count to the id of a coupon in Stripe.

We then retrieve the subscription from Stripe and apply the correct coupon based on the number of referrals recorded in the database for the account.

I still have to implement removing coupons when accounts are cancelled but for the time being that's not a concern for me.

If you have any questions, fire away.