It’s that time of the year when offices look lean and bare with empty chairs, sporting a subdued hum instead of the usual noisy chatter. Summers are when most employees take their earned leave, coinciding with school vacations.

This May has also seen crazy phenomena like the Game of Thrones (GoT) finale leading to mass bunking on a Monday, and in June there is the Cricket World Cup. Fridayitis — the syndrome of not showing up for work on Fridays in order to get a long weekend — is a particularly severe affliction during summers.

Though numbers for India are not available, in the US, a staggering 20.4 million employees admitted that watching the current season of GoT affected attendance at work, according to the Workforce Institute at Kronos.

Unplanned breaks

According to James Thomas, country manager, India, of Kronos, which provides an absence management software solution to companies, “Work schedules getting disrupted due to too many employees taking leave together is a much more challenging issue in India compared to anywhere else in the world.” That’s because our culture drives too much ad hoc, unplanned leave taking, he says, pointing out how, in the West, breaks are scheduled months ahead. “We in India may plan vacations earlier but we inform supervisors much later,” he says.

And because of the cultural dimension — joint families, tradition of visiting ancestral towns, religious festivals — leaves are a much more emotive issue here.

To compound matters, the leave policies in India are extremely complex. We have all sorts of leave allowances — earned leave, casual leave, compensatory offs, contingency leave — and a lot of our benefits, financial and otherwise, are focused around time off, he says.

This is not the case in other countries where organisations focus on presence management more than absence so benefits are around overtime and leave policies are extremely simple. “Our tendency is to manage presence very loosely,” says Thomas.

Tricky issue

Pratima Jain, Group Head HR, Paras Healthcare, admits that handling employee leaves during the summer vacation can often be a tricky issue, especially in a critical sector like hospitals. “However, planning the period well in advance, instituting clear policies on this matter and adopting a sensitive approach towards employees can help manage the situation without creating much friction,” she says. What Paras Healthcare has done is institute a policy that requires employees to submit their leave applications well in advance, especially for periods of long breaks such as summer or winter vacations. “We sometimes take the help of other team members to sail through a situation where two or more employees are on concurrent leaves. Some team members may be asked to stretch a little extra during that period to cover the absence of others,” she says.

Thomas of Kronos, however, frowns at asking other employees to pitch in more. “Fairness and equity often get hit,” he says, adding that you will find the same employees — often the best performers — being asked to fill in for colleagues, and this could have a long-term impact on employee retention.

“We need to be more professional about the leave issue,” he says, explaining that it happens because often managers hesitate to turn down leave applications as this affects engagement and morale. Also, leave request meetings in India often turn into long social chats with all sorts of irrelevant, personal issues discussed.

This is where machines could handle the requests better — a robotic chatbot can, in a matter-of-fact manner, accept or turn down requests without generating ill will. You could add constraints and conditions into the leave scheduling software.

For instance, put in a condition that if two employees are on leave on that date, the app will reject your leave application. Or the app could look at the track record of leave taken and decide on who to allocate it to.

Technology clicks

Ajay Kumar, Head HR, Continental India, a mobility solutions provider with 8,000 employees in India, says the company has an app that allows managers to view a comprehensive dashboard of all their team members’ past and future leaves, with one click. This makes leave tracking and planning easier.

“Another big change is the easy availability of employees — if they indicate beforehand that they can be contacted in case of urgent matters, they are only a quick call or message away anywhere on the planet,” he says.

But he points out that situations may arise when several employees may want to take time off during their children’s vacations to spend time with their families. For this, he says, “We promote collaborative discussion in planning vacations wherever possible to support business continuity. We find this approach is working very well in facilitating the right balance between personal priorities and business needs.” At Continental, the leave policy is that employees have to avail 50 per cent of their leaves in a year without carrying them over. “We encourage breaks,” says Kumar.

During summer vacations, even if employees are not going out of town on vacation, many — especially women — take leave to spend time with kids who are alone at home. Continental has smartly put in place week-long summer camps for employees’ children and organises factory visits for them to keep them engaged.

Some organisations that rely on apps that handle leave requests realise that ‘first come first served’ is not the best method as it leaves many deserving hard-working employees high and dry. So they have worked out methods that require all employees to hand in their leave requests on the same day. Each request is then considered on its merit.

Putting everybody’s leave on a public platform is also a great way to handle things.

But ultimately, to make sure that operations do not suffer in any way, companies need to do workload planning, map out resource requirements and connect it all to the leave management software. If this triangulation of data does not take place, the technology is not much help.

As Thomas concludes, “Absence does not exist in isolation.”

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