Various Solutions to Handle Maternity Leave in EC Time Management

[NeeleshKamath]

Hello Everyone,

Hope you are doing well and Safe wherever you are. Today, I will be showcasing some of the effective ways to handle maternity/paternity leave with different flavors mostly in European and SEA Countries.

Disclaimer

Please note that I am using custom fields in EC Time Management to arrive at various solutions for different countries. So, it is at your discretion, to use these solutions for customers. I would suggest you to evaluate these if this helps to achieve your customer requirements.  Also this solution needs to be evaluated if you have payroll integration in place.  This is the solution that can be used for the interim period. Also please ensure you have a smooth migration plan in place whenever the product comes up with a standard framework to handle Complete Maternity and Paternity Solution in the future.

 

Now let’s get started with all these variants.

European countries:

 

In Germany, we usually see requirements where the maternity leave depends upon the nature of the child i.e Normal child Vs Twins/Premature child

Further, the rule is 6 weeks before the birth and 8 or 12 weeks after birth depending on the nature of the child

Three custom fields: Nature of child, Calculated Date of Birth, and  Real Date of Birth are added. These custom fields will appear only when the leave type is “Maternity”

• When the due date (Calculated date of birth)  is entered employee is entitled to 6 weeks (42 days) before the due date and 8 weeks after (56). Total 98 days or 14 weeks.  This is for a single child

• When the due date (Calculated date of birth)  is entered employee is entitled to 6 weeks (42 days) before the due date and 12 weeks after (84). Total 126 or 18 weeks  This is for Multiple/premature children.

• When Real Birth Date is entered:
  
  
  • When the Real Date of Birth is before Due date (Calculated Date of Birth) the total duration remains the same (98 days / 126 days) depending on the nature of the child
  
  
  • When the Real Date of Birth is on or after Due Date (Calculated Date of Birth) the total duration is more by difference (between the due date and real date of birth)
  
  
  • In both the above cases, the number of days after the real date of birth remains 8 weeks (56 days) / 12 weeks (84) depending on the nature of the child.
  
  
  

 

Custom fields

 

Picklist for Type of Birth (Nature of Child)

 

The Business process is usually that Employee informs the HR when she is going on maternity leave with as usual a due date (either as proof from doctor certificate or verbally). The HR enters the Type of Birth (Single or Multiple/ Premature) and a Due Date (Calculated Date of Birth). Based on values in these fields, we can write onChange rules to derive at the Start Date and End Dates of Maternity leave request

 

The following onChange rule can be written and attached to the Calculated Date of Birth field when an Employee goes on Maternity Leave

During the Maternity period, there can be two cases

• A child is born before the due date (Calculated Date of Birth)

• A child is born after the due date

• Also, the child can be single or multiple or premature

 

The HR then enters the actual birth date of the child and The following onChange rule  attached to the real date of birth field is triggered to recalculate the start and end dates of the entire Maternity Leave request

Also, the third case which can also occur. Initially, an employee goes on Maternity leave with a due date assuming things would be normal.  The Start and End Dates of the leave are set using an onChange rule. It can happen that, a baby is born premature and much ahead of the schedule i.e before the initial anticipated start date of the leave request.

This is more of a corner case. In normal cases, you would enter a due date and go on leave (pre-delivery 6 weeks prior). You are already through your pre-delivery part of maternity leave and then the baby can come before the due date or after the due date.

In the corner case, the employee has not even started the pre-delivery leave period and delivers the child much before that, this can happen rarely and in such cases as per laws, it should be 12 weeks after the birth of the child.

Since the employees starts the leave only after the baby is born, the start date is set to Delivery or birth date and end date is set to 84 days . It is obligatory for employee to take 12 weeks after the birth of child

The rule which checks this is below

 

This blog is going to be a bit long. Hence Please bear with me ?. If you think you have got the idea already, you can skip reading further. For more insights, please continue looking ahead ?

 

Now we have little tweaks in countries like Netherlands. Overall concept remains same i.e using custom fields, but the rules are a bit different

• Pregnant Employees are entitled to 4-6 weeks pregnancy leave before due date and 10 weeks of Maternity Leave after Birth of Child

• Paid Leave which is same for any child – Premature, Normal or Twins in Calendar days. Hence custom field “Type of Birth” is not needed for NLD

• Examples: 4 weeks before and 12 weeks after OR 6 weeks before and 10 weeks after. Total 16 weeks. Only HR /Manager can enter as it is not ESS enabled

• If a baby is born after due date, the maternity leave gets extended by difference between due date and birth date. Say Calculated Date of Birth or due date is 31st Aug 2020

The start date is entered 4 weeks before as Aug 4th and End Date as 12 weeks after Nov 24th so that total becomes 112 days (16 weeks)

Assume that baby arrives two weeks late. Real date of birth is entered as Sep 14th 2020. Total duration is now 18 weeks or 126 days from start date. If HR tries to enter “Actual Return Date” as anything less or more than 126, we get a message

 

 

The variation to Germany is that here we cannot use on Change rules as the duration before the due date is not fixed and left to the employee (between 4 – 6 weeks). Hence, we use Take Rules in this case to check the duration based on various conditions

Sample Rules:

1) Based on Due Date

 

2) Based on the real date of birth

This concludes the solution for Netherlands

 

 

SEA Countries

 

In countries like Thailand from SEA, we have the following rules

 

• Maternity leave is up to 98 days for each pregnancy and this can be taken in multiple parts

• We have a custom field called due date of child (Calculated Date of Birth)

• The admin/employee can enter the due date of child when creating maternity requests which becomes the reference date for each maternity leave (after employee gives proof as pregnant and a due date)

• Then using take rules, we can check if sum of all maternity leave requests for that pregnancy is 98 days within a window period.

• The window period needs to be defined using above custom field (for ex: say it can be taken any time between the due date and 1 year from that date) but total quota of leave taken should not exceed 98 days

• The window period is then calculated in the take rule on the fly using the custom field and sum of all maternity leave requests including current request is checked so that it does not cross 98 days in that period.

 

 

Sample Rule

 

Hope you enjoyed reading this blog and sorry if it was a bit longer as I wanted to cover all the different variants. I am hopeful that this would help you in some or the other way in your implementations. Good luck!