Business process outsourcing is so common these days that most of us barely think about it. Around 66% of U.S. businesses rely on outsourcing partners to manage everything from accounting to logistics to marketing.

When you work in HR outsourcing, one of the hardest questions to answer is: what does an HR consultant actually do? It would be easier to answer the question, “What does an HR consultant not do?”

As consultants, we at Helios HR are big advocates of performance management. Performance Management encompasses planning for:

Compliance is often the greatest challenge when administering your company's leave policy. Employees are entitled to time off in certain circumstances, such as family emergencies, jury duty, military service, or dealing with a medical issue. But the leave laws that grant these rights are a complex mish-mash of local, state, and federal legislation.

It seems like everyone I speak to these days is seeing a spike in requests for PTO leave, parental leave, FMLA, and the like. After a year of lockdown, it makes sense that people are now jumping at the urge to take some time off. And, if the requests haven’t started coming in yet, everyone on your team will need time off in the future, whether it’s planned vacation time or an unplanned absence due to personal circumstances. Yet, despite the ubiquity of this task, leave administration can be one of the most complex processes to manage in HR when you have a large employee population.

I was recently reminded of a time when I was serving as the HR leader in an HR outsourcing engagement and one of my client's employees came to me with a query about family leave options available. This employee was about to become a mom through surrogacy, and she was unsure about what kind of benefits she could claim. Questions like, can adoptive parents claim short-term disability leave, like other employees do after childbirth?