Redesigning Leave Administration for a Post-Merger Workforce

When a payment technology company completed its merger with a fellow industry leader, most integration activities moved quickly. Time away from work (TAFW) administration was a notable exception.

Two legacy teams continued administering leave programs under different rules and long-established operational habits. Depending on which legacy organization a team member came from, leave analysts were following different practices for pay continuation, short-term disability coordination, military leave administration, and other TAFW processes. The inconsistent approaches created operational inefficiencies and made it difficult to administer leave programs consistently across the merged workforce.

By the time SBA was engaged, analysts were spending approximately 60% of their time managing a leave administration inbox that had become a catch-all for inquiries from HR business partners, team members, and the third-party leave administrator. Another 30% of analyst time was devoted to manually reviewing payroll reports during every pay cycle, including records where no changes had occurred since the prior review period.

SBA began by identifying where the operational pressure was most severe: the leave administration inbox and payroll reporting processes. Before recommending changes, the team needed to understand how work was flowing through the organization, why manual effort had accumulated, and which responsibilities properly belonged with the leave administration team versus other internal or external stakeholders.

The engagement combined interviews, documentation review and two half-day on-site working meetings with the analysts responsible for administering the programs day to day. SBA also conducted a quantitative analysis of the leave administration inbox to pinpoint the primary drivers of email volume. The analysis revealed that approximately 80% of outgoing responses were directed toward just three groups, while nearly 70% of incoming emails fell into two categories that accounted for the majority of inbox activity.

Separately, SBA reviewed the payroll reporting workflow to understand why analysts were spending so much time on manual report review each pay period. The team mapped each step, evaluated whether the underlying issues stemmed from process gaps, vendor limitations, system constraints or unclear ownership responsibilities, and identified opportunities to eliminate repetitive review work where no record changes had occurred since the prior pay cycle.

In all, SBA identified five major areas where TAFW practices had diverged between the two legacy organizations: pay continuation rules, short-term disability coordination, military leave administration, leave extensions, and COBRA handling. Based on these findings, SBA developed a prioritized roadmap to standardize practices, clarify ownership responsibilities, streamline workflows, and create a more consistent operational framework across the merged organization.

The project transformed a fragmented post-merger leave administration structure into a more unified and sustainable TAFW operating model.

By standardizing practices across the two legacy organizations and clarifying ownership responsibilities, the organization reduced unnecessary manual work, streamlined workflows, and alleviated operational pressure on the leave administration team.

The engagement also created a clearer framework for managing leave processes going forward, allowing the organization to administer TAFW programs more consistently across the merged workforce.