"Dear employees, you will be put on furlough."
Hundreds of thousands of business owners and managers were forced to utter such sentences due to coronavirus preventive measures. This otherwise seldomly used term has now taken up a new shape in an unprecedented measure.
What exactly does this mean for the employees? The Business Insider defined the term this way: “…an employee furlough is when employers require their staff to take unpaid leaves of absence. In other words, they won't work. They won't get paid. But they'll still technically be employed.”
In this article we want to focus on the HR Managers who have been at the epicenter of the changes, reorganization and people care. Along with the IT, Finance and Operations, they have become engineers of a tech-web to accommodate new HR processes. Fortunately, a good number of innovative HR tech companies are covering your back.
So let’s get a bit technical here. You would want to explore your current time and absence tracking tools to accommodate furlough records. This, in a nutshell, encompasses updating the employee records attaching a new Contract Appendix, creating a new type of time off, and running expanded reports. You want to keep an overview of the current employment status of all teams and locations.
If you don’t see these options in your HR Tool right away, don’t panic! Go to your vendor. The majority of the HR tech providers have already added the furlough option to their absence list and updated their reports with new fields. With cloud-based solutions, it is actually very easy to turn on the function in your account without any complicated interventions. And the best part is that majority of the tech developers are adding these updates even to the basic price plans at no extra cost.
This is how it works in our XperienceHR application:
1/ Creating New Time Off Type in Configuration
2/ Furlough is added to the list of possible absences
3/ Furlough appears in the employee profile as active
With XperienceHR Time off feature, you can add and manage any type of absence accross your global teams.
