In the current situation, as for many other types of environmental and social crises, companies need to become more flexible to accommodate and keep their workforce engaged and motivated.

More specifically, in order to comply with currently evolving regulations and governmental recommendations, employers would like to be more flexible with respect to their time-off policies. To do so, SuccessFactors Employee Central Time Off can help you better manage your employee’s leave times and time off. In this short post, we will explore 2 options on how EC Time Off can help to be more accommodating with your employee’s time.

 

1 – Be more flexible with vacation bookable periods

 

The concept of the bookable periods is rather straight forward. Let’s imagine you accrue 4 weeks of vacation each year. Some organizations allow you to use this vacation time in the current year and payoff the balance at the end of the year, while others give you an additional period at the beginning of next year to use this vacation time. Let’s say you’ve accrued 4 weeks of vacation during the year and need to consume it during the same year or there will be a payout at the end of the vacation calendar. This means that for a 4 weeks vacation accrued in 2019 (let’s say the vacation calendar is from May 1^st, 2019 to April 30^th, 2020) you would need to use the full 4 weeks before April 30^th, 2020 or get a payout.

 

 

In the current pandemic context, companies might see a benefit of keeping the vacation balance available for the employee to take paid vacation in case they need to take care of their kids, family members, or fall ill themselves. This option gives more flexibility to the employee if they need to take time off or cannot work full weeks, and does not require the employer to add any new vacation time.

 

 

To do this, you will need to configure the following:

• A business rule to define the criteria and the new bookable end date
• Update the appropriate vacation time type in Employee Central
• Run and validate a Time Off Calendar to publish the changes to the employee vacation time accounts automatically

 

2 – Configuration of a COVID-19 Leave

 

In Employee Central Time Off, we separate different leave types in what we call “time types”. Some examples of time types are: Vacation, Paid Sick Leave, Unpaid Sick Leave, Maternity and Paternity Leave, etc.

To be able to track and report on sick leaves that are specific to the current pandemic, organizations might want to separate the “regular” leaves from the leaves that are resulting from COVID-19. Also, some companies might also want to grant extra sick leaves to motivate employees to stay home if they have symptoms. To do so, you can create a new time type to track specifically for COVID-19. You can also create a time account to grant each employee a specific number of days they can take, as the bellow example shows:

Employee Time Off view:

 

 

Please note that the 20 days available to the employee in this example is what has been configured for demo purposes. The number of accrued days (or hours) can be configured based on the policy.

HR admin view:

 

 

In this example, all leaves taken using the COVID-19 time account can be reported and used to keep track of the impact this pandemic had on your business.

 

To do this, you will need to configure the following:

• Create accrual business rule (if applicable)
• Create the Time Type, Time Account and association with Time Profile
• Run and validate the Account Creation and Accrual Time Off Calendars to automatically create the time account and postings (if applicable)

 

These were only two of many options for which EC Time Off can help you be more flexible and better manage your workforce.

Also, keep in mind that these suggestions are valid in more positive contexts as well! Changes in policy, new paid leave types, job anniversary added vacation and changes in regulations are all situations where these suggestions can be used!

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions, for more information or if you would like some help putting in place these suggestions.

 

Stay safe and positive,

Jean-Luc Corneli

SAP SuccessFactors Consultant

IN-RGY