Meeting with stakeholders

A leave approval system is referred to one of the simple yet crucial Human resource (HR) activities that have the potential to consume a significant amount of time of the HR department. With the help of this system, the HR department manages the number of leaves taken by an employee and the specific reason behind this. According to researchers, a poor leave approval system has the potential to impose negative impact on the performance of the employees. In this report, a plan for creating a leave approval system for X organization has been created in order to enhance employee performance and loyalty towards the organization.

1. Evidence of consultation with users or stakeholders

In order to develop an effective leave approval system a meeting with stakeholders, i.e. directors, HR manager and team leaders of each department of the X organization has been conducted. The meeting minutes are as follows:

Meeting topic: Development of leave approval system

Date: 8/3/2018    Time: 9.00am to 11.30 pm

Location: office conference room

Chairperson: Mr. Y, HR manager

Meeting Agenda: To access the issues associated with the current leave approval system

Meeting minutes:

• A leave tracker that will show how many leaves have been taken by an employee will be implemented in each employee’s portal.
• Unplanned leave will require proper justification for approval.
• Employees will be provided with the opportunity to enash their leave after each financial year.

1. Detailed cost estimation of developing the leave approval system

Developers	Budget
HR department	1000 dollars
Efficiency consultants	3000 dollars
IT technicians	4000 dollars

Worksheet for evaluating developers

Developers	Role
HR  department	1.      Conducting meeting with the employees in order to understand their concern about leaves. 2.      Developing policies for the new  leave approval system
Efficiency consultants	Developing strategies that needs to eradicate the mentioned issues
IT Technicians	Developing the application that will be implemented in the employees portal

An action plan

Action	Individual/individuals responsible for the Action	Time
1.      The issues associated with the current leave management system will be assessed	HR manager	2-3 weeks
2.      An application for jotting down the number of leaves taken by each employees along with the number of planned, unplanned and unapproved leaves will be developed	IT technicians	2-5 weeks
3.      Number of casual leaves, pay leaves and non pay leaves for each designation will be developed	Consultants	2 weeks
4.      A tracker, where each employee will be able to track their leaves will be developed.	IT technicians	2-3 weeks
5.      Policies and regulations that each and every employees of X organization needs to follow when it comes to leave will be developed.	Consultants	2 weeks

Procedures for using the new leave approval system

• Every employee must apply for leave for 1 to 3 days to the HR department at least 24 hours for approval.
• In case an employee needs a leave due to an emergency, authentic reasons along with proper evidence needs to be submitted to the HR department for approval.
• Each and every employee must send an email to his or her team leader stating the date, duration and reason for taking leave to his or her team leader (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2017).
• Total number of paid leaves that can be taken by an employee includes 24 leaves. However, a employee will be given 20 leaves at once.
• Every employee should feel the tracker provide in their portal in order to keep the count of their leave.
• In case of unapproved leave, the salary of 2 days will be deducted.

1. Communication

It is inform you that our company has created a new leave approval system in order to eradicate the complaints and issues associated with leave. Lately a good number of employees in the organization are suffering from dissimilarity in the number of leaves shown in the report and according to their own tracker. This has raised the concern of the management since leave issues are hampering our productivity and performance. The new leave approval system will keep the track of the leave as well as access the tracker filled by each employees so that no further dissmilarities can take place.

Hence active participation of all employees are required for the success of the new mentioned system.

1. Training Needs analysis

Individuals to be trained	Training given	Time for training
1.      The  employees of the Human resource department	1.      For developing communication skill so that exact issues associated with leaves of the employees can be understood through effective communication 2.       For developing effective policies and procedures associated with leaves	2 weeks ( on job training)
2.      To supervisors of each departments	1.      To develop communication skills for effective communication with the employees, 2.      To scrutinize the authentic reason for leave before approving the same.	2 weeks ( on job training)

Risk management plan

Risk	Risk Level	Measures taken
Low	Medium	High
1.      Employees are not participating actively				Meeting will be conducted with the employees and they will be educated about their benefit associated with the system.
2.      Discrimination is taking place with respect to gender, age and favourism				Rapid and strict action will be taken against the individual practising favourism and partialty
3.      Employees are not able to avail leave even after sending mail prior to 24 hours.				The situation will be scrutinized within 24 hours.
4.      Employees are not given maternity leaves, disability leave or sick leaves.				The authenticity of the issue will be scrutinized and leave will be granted on an emergency basis.

Privacy Policy and Anti-discrimination Policy

• No discrimination while approving leave on the basis of age, gender, race and sexual origin will be entertained. Strict legal action and financial penalty depending on the severity of the issue will be conducted.
• Leakage of confidential information given by the employee for leave purpose will not be entertained. Strict legal action and financial penalty depending on the severity of the issue will be conducted.

1. Legislative requirements of the leave approval system

In order to keep accordance with the legislative requirements of Australia, the mentioned system needs to follow the bellow mentioned regulation.

Annual leave act 1973: according to the act, Employees are entitled to annual leave at the end of every year of employment.

Long service leave act 1073: This act states that an employee who has completed 7 years service with a single employer is entitled to long service leave for the period of the service.

Assignment 2:

1. Monitoring report

Time span of monitoring	Project monitored	Major issues monitored	Grades of effectiveness (High, medium, low)
4 months	The tracker detected for tracking the number of leaves taken by each employee, number of paid leaves and number of unpaid leaves is working properly.	Discrepancy in detecting the leaves of 6 employees amongst 205 employees of the organization has been found.	Medium
4 months	The HR department is monitoring whether all the employees are feeling up their tracker effectively	Discrepancy in detecting the leaves of 6 employees amongst 205 employees of the organization has been found.	Medium
4 months	No discrimination on the basis of age , gender or sexual orientation is taken place	In the finance department, the leave of an employee with homogeneous sexual orientation was not approved.	high
4 months	Employees are provided with maternity leaves, disability leaves and sick leaves	An female employee working in the IT department was approved of maternity leave for 1 week instead of 1 month.	high

Key Performance Indicator for the Leave Approval system

1. 1. Retention of talent: This KPI indicates the stability of job stability of an organization. In this era of high competition, it is highly crucial for an organization to retain its skilled employees to enhance the productivity of the business and thus gain competitive advantages over its competitors. In order to retain skilled employees, it is highly crucial to enhance their work life balance. Limited number of leaves will thus make the employee unsatisfied with the opportunities provided by the organization which in turn will cause employee attrition (Kerzner and Kerzner 2017).
   2. Absenteeism:
   3. Better employee performance: Providing the employees with an adequate work life balance makes an employee satisfied with his workplace. Obviously, this will impose a positive impact on the performance of the employees (Hughes 2012). Leaves helps employee to build down their own time schedules.
   4. Better loyalty of the employee: Organizations that offers adequate e leaves to the employees gain competitive advantages over other organization when it comes to employee retention. This is because, employees tries to stick to the organization which have high leave facilities. This in turn enhances the loyalty of the employees towards the organization.

The three above mentioned KPIs can be considered as the chief reasons behind development of the new leave approval measures for the mentioned organization.

As informed earlier, our organization has implemented a new leave approval system that will help employees to get approval for their leave. Keeping in mind the issues that have been faced by the management as well as by the employees, several changes has been implemented in the new system which has been stated in the following paragraph.

1. Unlike the previous system where only the management used to keep the track of the leaves taken by the employees, the new system has enabled both the management as well as the employees to keep track of their leave. A new tracker tab has been provided in the dashboard of every employee (McPherson and Pincus 2017).
2. In the new leave approval system, only verbal communication with the team leader when it comes to emergency leave is not enough. In case of emergency leave taken, the employee has to bring documents stating the reason for his or her absence for getting it approved.
3. Lastly, in order to get any planned leave approved, employees needs to send email to the team leader through official email id at least before 24 hours.

The above mentioned changes have been implemented in order to ensure that greater amount of leaves need for authentic causes are getting approved without hampering the productivity and performance of an organization. However, in order to meet the goal of the system, participations of all the employees are highly required.

1. An induction plan

The purpose of the induction plan is to ensure that all the employees have gathered enough knowledge about the new policies and procedure of the leave approval system (Thompson 2017).

Structure of the induction	Duration	Points  to be discussed
First phase	30 minutes to1 hour	·         Stating the employees about the importance of the leave approval system ·         Discussing briefly about the leave policies that must be implemented in the organization in order to ensure an effective leave approval system
Second phase	2hours	·         The goals of the new leave approval system ·         Policies and procedures associated with the above mentioned system ·         Number of leaves allocated for each employee ·         Number of paid and unpaid leaves.

Privacy Policy:

• The personal data and information provided by the employees are considered to be highly confidential to the company.
• The information collected during the approval of leave are considered to be highly confidential to the company.
• The scrutiny that are conducted to ensure the authenticity of the leave should not intervene the personal life of an employee
• Any questions asked to the employees by the management about his or her personal life that is irrelevant to the leave will not be entertained.

Anti-discrimination Policy

• Any discriminatory act on the basis of race, colour, sexual orientation, gender or age of an employee while conducting information or approving leave will not be entertained and strict legal action will be taken if necessary.
• No favours for any employee shown by the superior will be highly penalized.
• The severity of the penalty will depend on the degree of violation of the policy.

Reference list

Hughes, O.E., 2012. Public management and administration: An introduction. Macmillan International Higher Education.

Kerzner, H. and Kerzner, H.R., 2017. Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

McPherson, R.A. and Pincus, M.R., 2017. Henry’s Clinical Diagnosis and Management by Laboratory Methods E-Book. Elsevier Health Sciences.

Pollitt, C. and Bouckaert, G., 2017. Public management reform: a comparative analysis-into the age of austerity. Oxford University Press.

Thompson, J.D., 2017. Organizations in action: Social science bases of administrative theory. Routledge.