Leave Sharing amongst co-workers: Augure India first introduced and applied in 2009

On May 4, 2012, Times of India, the largest circulated English news daily from India, published an anchor story on a scheme which allows employees to donate their excess leave to their colleagues who may need it in the times of crisis. Most probably, the story has been carried in all editions of the Times of India.

Ms. Namrata Singh of Times News Network (TNN) in her story "Leave-pooling catches on in companies", wrote, “The latest on the sharing front is something called leave-pooling that one can, quite literally, bank on. An innovation by a corporate, the scheme allows employees to donate their excess leave to their colleagues who may need it in times of crisis”.

Naming the corporate which recently introduced this policy, she continued, "Accenture India, which recently introduced this policy called ‘Hours That Help’, believes that apart from the basic benefit it offers needy employees, encourages the spirit of sharing as well”. 

Quoting Manoj Biswas, Geographic Unit HR Lead of Accenture India, Ms. Singh wrote, "it emerged as a result of many of our people wanting to assist their colleagues who needed extra leave on account of a medical emergency or personal problem. We also recognized that many people did not avail of their leave fully by the end of the year. This offered us an opportunity to address both situations”.

But in real, it is not Accenture India which is “the pioneer” in introducing leave sharing application as claimed in the Times of India story, rather a very little known company – Augure India Information Services Private Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Augure SA, France, had introduced and applied the policy of online leave sharing system way back in 2009.

Incorporated in 2008, Augure India Information Services Private Limited was into design and development of corporate communications solutions for reputation and media management for its overseas clients. With two offices in India – Vadodara in Gujarat and Pune in Maharashtra, Augure India which worked  with boards, management teams, communication professionals and marketing agencies worldwide to manage complex national and global CSR, public affairs, PR and product strategies, had delivered an end-to-end portfolio of software, intelligence, tools and consulting services.

Sharing leaves with co-workers online was conceived by Abhijit Mukhopadhyay, the then Director on Board and Country Head of Augure India. Mr. Mukhopadhyay, a seasoned internal and external communications professional, realised that more than bonding, it was employer branding which was a need of the hour to attract and retain best talent for a little known start up company like Augure India. The main challenge was to denote the reputation of Augure India as a good employer.

Ms. Anindita Basu, who was an MCA student and a project intern with Augure India Information Services Private Limited, submitted her project report on “Employee Management System at Augure India” as partial fulfilment of Master of Computer Applications (MCA) studies in June 2009 to Vasad based Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Institute of Technology under Gujarat University. In between January to June 2009 she got involved in the development and enhancement of the entire Employee Management System of Augure India where sharing of leaves with co-workers was a module.

Sick Leave Donation Application of Augure India

Though Augure India Information Services Private Limited was a very small company dedicated to Sentiment Monitoring, Reputation Management with Public Relations Consultancy, but acted in a transparent manner and had deployed written policies on Employee Management Systems. The Employees Engagement System which was comprised of Creation of own profile with name designation, department, contact address and number, official and personal mail ids, sharing of news, views, photos, music etc with read, edit, delete and searching facilities; posting comments on a particular article or photograph; planning out vacations in advance; one click newsletter sharing; online leave application and approval with leave history; searching of various policies of the company including leave rule policy etc were introduced to be transparent from the initial days of its operation.

The online leave sharing helped Augure India in three ways – increased the bonding amongst co-workers, employee branding and goodwill as well as employee engagement.

There are many organizations which have failed miserably in proper employee engagement programme. In a recent study, it has been observed that 57 per cent of unengaged employees do not trust seniors of their organization!

Since Augure India has deployed a transparent employee engagement system since its initial days of operation, there were hardly any incident that employees had not trusted their seniors and left the organization with a bad note.

But sharing leaves is still not very common in India. What Accenture India has introduced recently, Augure India has developed and implemented the system way back in 2009.