When the Approver Is Away

Look at where auto-approvals cluster and they will be concentrated around absence: annual leave, sickness, a secondment, a vacancy between one manager leaving and the next arriving.

The approval issue in “When the Approver Is Away” becomes easier to diagnose when the record shows both the submitted hours and the operational context around them. A team evaluating ethical employee monitoring for ethical employee monitoring should define what an approver must actually check, how a disputed entry is returned and which activity signals are context rather than proof that the work occurred.

This is predictable in most of its forms and the fix is administrative, which is why it persists: nobody owns it, it belongs to three systems, and it only causes visible harm at an audit.

For a separate benchmark relevant to “When the Approver Is Away”, consult the official Scrum Guide. Use it to test record quality, approvals, retention, employee rights and exception handling against the real workflow rather than treating a software report as self-explanatory evidence.

The predictable cases

Annual leave is booked in advance in a system the organisation already runs. Any leave spanning a submission deadline is identifiable weeks ahead, and in most organisations no process connects the leave booking to the approval queue.

Shutdowns are in the calendar. Secondments and parental leave have start dates. Notice periods are known. Between them these account for the large majority of absence-related gaps, and a monthly report joining approved leave against the approval calendar finds every one.

The unpredictable cases

Sickness and emergencies. Here the fix is not planning but a standing arrangement: every approver has a configured deputy at all times, not set when they go away.

A permanent deputy has a second benefit. It removes the step that gets skipped — nobody has to remember to configure anything — and it means the cover is somebody chosen deliberately rather than whoever is available on the Monday.

The vacancy case

The worst and the most often missed. A manager leaves, their reports are not reassigned for a month, and in that month the approval queue has no owner at all.

This should be part of the leaver process with a named owner and a date, and it almost never is. The leaver checklist covers equipment, accounts, handover and access, and omits the approval queue because it belongs to a system HR does not administer. Adding one line to that checklist removes a recurring month-long hole.

What the rule should do when nobody acts

In most configurations the answer is approve, for the payroll reason. If payment has been decoupled from approval — which it should be — the answer can be escalate instead, and the difference is substantial.

Escalation to the next level up, with a clear statement of what is outstanding and why, puts the decision in front of somebody who can make it. Approval by timer puts it nowhere and records it as a human act. Where escalation is not possible, the minimum is that the record says the rule approved it, not the person.

Covering without knowledge

A deputy covering a team they do not know has the same problem as any approver without independent knowledge, and worse. They should not be asked to assert more than they can.

A workable arrangement: the deputy approves ordinary weeks, defined by the exception rules, and anything flagged is held for the approver's return and settled in the following period. This keeps the payroll deadline, keeps the judgement with somebody who can exercise it, and produces an honest record of both.

Measuring it

One number, per period: the proportion of approvals that happened by rule rather than by a person, broken down by team.

Plot it over a year and the absence pattern is immediately visible — the August spike, the December spike, the one department that is high every month because their manager left in March. It is the single most informative chart in this whole area, it takes a morning to build, and in most organisations nobody has ever drawn it.

Coming back to a cleared queue

The returning approver sees nothing outstanding and reasonably concludes that the period was handled. If a rule cleared it, nothing tells them otherwise, and the absence of a signal is indistinguishable from the absence of a problem.

A summary on return — these weeks were approved by rule while you were away, these by your deputy, here are the ones that were flagged — takes one report and gives them the chance to look at what matters before the period closes. It is also the most effective way of getting deputies configured next time, because it makes the consequence of not having one visible to the person who can fix it.