Support for managing employee time at a global level is rarely addressed by HR providers. However, global payroll providers are expanding services to support global absence management, and a number of market changes are helping drive buyer adoption and growth of these services.

The challenge of global absence management

Firstly, improving employee experiences is often a focus area for HR functions, to support engagement and improve open communications, as well as to help build trust and ensure employees feel valued. As absences affect work productivity, team engagement, and potentially also wages and payroll, organizations are increasingly looking to elevate their employee experience with advanced absence management capability.

Secondly, although absence administration is typically an area most employees engage in through a self-service portal for sickness and vacation, additional absence types (e.g., military leave, jury leave, and maternity/paternity/adoption) are more complicated to process, often requiring additional documentation to be reviewed. Setting up these time types within self-service portals is often considered too costly, as the system set-up for these infrequent transaction types can be overly complicated. Hence, the administration is often manual and left to HR teams to manage rather than being part of employees’ self-service options. This leads to sub-optimal results, as administration is reliant on variable capability across systems, teams and processes, with no single global view. Also, servicing absence management becomes more challenging for organizations looking to outsource payroll, as this can cause knowledge loss and gaps in delivery capability. Many HR functions rely on payroll teams to correctly apply absence legislation.

The Vistra approach

Consequently, it is a natural extension of global payroll service provider capabilities to offer full absence management services. One such example of a global payroll vendor that has recently expanded its services to offer global absence management is Vistra, who launched its Global Absence Management (GAM) service in 2024. This offering comes with absence compliance service levels and is available to employees through the Vistra HR app, which is written in Java and hosted on Amazon AWS.

Vistra offers speed of deployment and is currently servicing ten clients. It is currently available for 20 countries as extensions to its global payroll services, with the aim of serving up to 100 countries in future. The service is designed for organizations with less than 1k employees in any single country.

Key features of the Vistra service include:

• Country Compliance: built with robust country compliance rules, adapting to the legislative requirements of each country
• Business Compliance: business rules and policies are overlaid at a country level
• Centralised Oversight: the dedicated Vistra team oversees and manages local compliance and everyday absence management as a service, ensuring all pay period actions are accurately processed, and providing monthly management reporting
• Integration with Payroll: Absence-related actions are automatically fed to the Vistra payroll teams, streamlining the process and minimizing manual errors.

Initial target clients are small and mid-sized organizations facing resource challenges for specialized HR knowledge in countries with smaller populations. However, we expect payroll vendors to increasingly support larger organizations in global absence services as capability matures and market awareness grows.

NelsonHall perspective

Whilst absence management capability includes both legislative and business rules, the administration of these rules can be cumbersome and complex, sometimes requiring HR teams to apply business or line manager discretion. As such, clear documentation is critical, as are effective tools to support communication and manage appropriate approval processes through workflows. With increased investments seen in workflow and collaboration tools across HR services, the management of absence types beyond basic sickness and vacation can be more easily supported. However, to be successful in this market, strong compliance management is a key area for vendors to demonstrate.