Delivering Innovation for Employee Central Time Management – Purchase Leave/Buy Time | SAP Blogs

As a result of our continued investment in Time Management we strive to deliver new features and experiences that make your investments worthwhile in SuccessFactors. I am excited to share with you a brand new feature in employee central time – Purchase leave. Purchase Leave is an ability for employee to purchase time off that can be paid in a pro-rated deduction over a period of time to enable employees to achieve work life balance without going on leave of absence.

Background Information

Employers today are coming up creative rewarding strategy to attract and retain Millennials and as they get ready to hire generation Z into workplace, they need to rethink their strategy for total rewards to offer work-life balance which has been constantly rated as a top benefit to drive productivity. Many researches have clearly indicated that apart from growth opportunities, one of the most sought after benefit will be flexible time off which will be the key component to drive up employee productivity and happiness.

Buying Time Promotes Happiness

(“Ref: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5559044/)

Gen Z cares most about work-life balance and personal well-being

https://dynamicsignal.com/2019/09/19/generation-z-in-the-workplace/

Scenarios for Purchase Time

1: Allow employees to purchase time to take additional time off for vacation

2: Allow employees to purchase time to take additional time off for continued education

3: Employees purchase time to recover from a sickness or take care of a sick family member

With correct policy guidelines employers can provide additional flexibility to their employees to buy either few days or few weeks to meet their personal needs to achieve work life balance. This purchased time can be recovered from the employee in a one-time or pro-rated deduction so employees are not on unpaid leave of absence. This is really valuable benefit that will boost employee morale by giving them more control over their time off.

Why should you implement this?

A flex time off policy is likely to make you employer of choice

This benefit can provide additional time off to your employees during the time they need it the most to pursue and take care of things that matter most. It is one of the hot benefits on the flex benefit list. It also gives them more control that allows them to have more time off to pursue their personal passions or take care of themselves or their families.

Included with Employee Central Time OFF

This is included with Employee Central Time Off offering so as a customer you can get huge value in implementing this feature without having to pay additional license or consulting cost. The self service capability will definitely lower your administrative burden and also provide wonderful user experience to your end users

Feature Rich

Using the Purchase time , customers can empower their employees to purchase time based on their eligibility through a simplified user experience. Employees  can indicate the quantity they wish to purchase and also indicate a time period to pay for this purchase at the time of making the purchase. Customers can build validation rules around the amount purchased by configuring business rules as per their business needs and can also route a purchase leave request for approval

End to End Integration

Once a purchase request is approved, we automatically create a recurring deduction with total hours/days that employee purchased in EC recurring deduction portlet and create a time account with the total balance so employee can request time off against the time account.

Purchase leave also has an end to end integration with EC payroll which works out of the box for Australian Public Sector.

A Peak into the Purchase Leave Experience!!!

The ability for employee to be able to purchase time has been a long standing influence ticket by many of our customers and we listened to you and have delivered a simplified, feature rich self service experience for your employees to buy time. Here is a sneak peak into the feature:

Action Search/New Home Page Tile for Purchase.

We have delivered an action search capability for your employees to do action search or launch the purchase leave dashboard from the home page tile

Please note you can customize action search so your employees can search for terms more relevant to your business like Buy Time

Purchase Leave Dashboard

This is the landing page when your users come to when they click on Purchase Leave link on Action Search or click on Home page tile (Purchase Time). It shows all the purchases that employee has made so far, what is the time account balance and also the deduction schedule for purchased time.. Employees can click on ‘Create’ to create a new purchase leave request:

Simplified User Experience

The employees can create a new request for purchased leave by entering only the necessary fields: equivalents unit (in weeks) or actual quantity in time account unit (days/weeks) and fill some optional fields such as attachment and comments which users can use to add supporting documents or provide additional details for supporting their request. Customers can also configure custom help text in the top that can take employees to the company policy page using embedded hyperlinks.

We have also delivered an acknowledge process which allow you to track employee’s consent to take deduction from their payroll based on purchased leave. You can enable this in your local regulations will like you to track employee’s consent.

Once enabled, employees have to click on yes to the acknowledgement to proceed with submitting the request.

Additional confirmation after submit so employee is consciously submitting a request to buy more time.

We support workflow capabilities for purchases. The employee can see the approval hierarchy at the time of submit and click on approver icon in the dashboard at any time to view the status of their payout approval.

Approver Experience

Navigate to the To-Do list to quick approve purchase leave requests

Approver can click on the Request to see Approval details

Admin Experience

We have added a new tab on Time Admin workbench for admins to view purchased leave request and its status for the employees. They can also use it to create new requests on behalf of employees

I hope you enjoyed  reading and learning about our new feature. Stay tuned for my new blog on step by step configuration instructions for Purchased Leave.

In the meantime here is link for documentation that you can refer to. Your feedback/comments will be hugely appreciated and also let me know if you have any questions on the feature.