It sure seems everything HR has gone global these days. When I first got into HR Tech consulting almost everything that came across my desk was US-centric: the domestic-only employers who were hiring me, the HRIS systems with hard-coded US fields, and the US-only vendors. ¡Ay, caramba!! How times have changed. We recently helped a Chicago-based client of ours place their payroll business into 47 countries. And last year, a St. Louis company took us to 42 countries including the US. (Although neither of them saw a reason we needed to visit each country in person for happy hour comparisons like we thought we needed to!)

Well, wouldn’t you know, I was recently asked to give a presentation on the state of Global Leave Administration, so I begged one of our teammates, Brianne, to help broaden my mind. Among our client employers, there certainly is a growing interest in having the ability to track leave out of a single global instance, but these are highly unchartered waters. Since I’m going to be out this week for shoulder surgery (too many staff floggings!), we’d thought we’d run a two part summary of the research Brianne unearthed on the topic of global leave admin. (After all, it’s better than a “Greatest Hits” montage!)

Proper leave management is required to ensure cost control, legal compliance and a more productive workforce.  The technology solutions currently available provide the employer with the tools to track leave, determine eligibility and coordinate with payroll.  But just tracking leave balances isn’t enough.  Knowing the various leave laws specific to each country is a task yet to be undertaken, and a daunting one at that.  Determining leave laws and ensuring compliance is complicated, and as we researched the subject, we were unable to find any vendors that could fully meet the needs of employers.  However, if someone was looking for a global payroll expert ten years ago, they would’ve been faced with the same problem, and now there are numerous global payroll providers available to employers.  Brianne and I both believe that we will find this also to be true of global leave administration in the not-so-distant future.

From a technology standpoint, there are several vendors who have the capability to separate employees into different rules groups, offer multiple language and currency options and allow the employer to report on the entire organization from one system.  These systems enable the employer to track leave balances, categorize leave, grant self-service functionality (such as time-off requests), maintain audit trails, automate processes, setup notifications, track intermittent leave and store pertinent documents.  These systems provide the tools employers need to track leave, but ultimately the employer is responsible for setting up the rules within the system to enforce local regulations and corporate policies.

Let’s walk through an example.  An employee, Jane, is located in Country A and she is currently expecting her first child.  Jane submits a request in the leave system to begin using her maternity leave 15 weeks prior to her due date.  However, in Country A the law doesn’t require the employer to allow maternity leave until the employee is 11 weeks from her due date.  Before Jane can even submit her time off request, a notification pops up alerting Jane that she cannot request maternity leave until she is 11 weeks away from her due date.  So the system is setup to stop the employee from taking the leave too early, and at the same time informs Jane of the specific rules regarding her maternity leave.  However, in this situation the employer would have to be aware of these rules and setup the notifications to automatically generate.

Let’s keep going with this same example.  Say Jane goes into labor and has the baby a few weeks early.  HR can go into the system and open a new case for Jane’s maternity leave.  The case manager allows HR to track Jane’s leave, store documents and review statuses and upcoming deadlines.  In Country A, 90 days of maternity leave is paid 50% by the employer and 50% by social security.  Once HR has input the maternity leave into the case manager, the system automatically populates the time-off in the employee’s timecard, which is then passed to payroll and then Jane is paid at 50% for that time.  The employer is required to submit the maternity leave to Country A so that Jane can receive social security for the remaining 50%.  The system generates the form from a library of stored documents and notifies HR when it is time to submit the paperwork.  Again, in this scenario the employer is responsible for setting up the system with the proper notifications and uploading the appropriate forms for HR to use.

One vendor, Workforce Software, is working to standardize their global templates, which would make it easier for new clients to setup the rules for each country.  But there still remains a gap where the employer is responsible for understanding the existing leave laws specific to each country.  Many employers would rather depend on a vendor to track these rules and update the system with any changes, which currently only exists for the US and Canada. (Canada’s leave laws are very similar to the US.)

If you’ll check back in on Thursday we’ll dive deeper into this need in part 2: Global Leave Compliance. In the meantime, have you heard of any other companies offering global leave solutions? Any vendors want to weigh in on this topic and offer your wares? Please share them with @HRTechKaiser or by commenting below. We’d love to hear your war stories, and who knows, if we get enough comments to this blog posting, perhaps we’ll spur some vendor’s Product Management teams into Global Leave action!