Truly Global Time Off Policies

About the Company

Deel is the fastest-growing B2B SaaS company in history, offering comprehensive global HR solutions for hiring, payroll, and compliance in over 150 countries.

Stages of the project

1. The Problem and hypothesis
2. Understanding the opportunity
3. Goals
4. Design
1. Policy management
2. Policy creation and templates
3. Assignment
5. Results

The Problem

As Deel expanded into a leading global company for payroll and HR management, it became essential to develop a robust HRIS system to meet evolving customer needs. A critical component of this system was a time-off platform, enabling clients to create, assign, and manage various policies for their employees.

My primary challenge as the owner of the time-off team’s lead designer was to adapt these functionalities to a platform designed for clients with employees and contractors worldwide. This required developing scalable designs that addressed complex legal constraints while maintaining a visually cohesive and user-friendly experience for all.

Hypothesis

If we build a robust time-off tool that addresses various potential edge cases, we can attract larger enterprise companies to our HRIS system, seamlessly integrate them into the DEAL ecosystem, and create opportunities to upsell additional products to our existing customers.

Understanding the opportunity

Internal stakeholder interviews

Conversations with legal, payroll, and HR experts within Deel helped us gather the following insights:

• There was a great need for scalability across multiple countries with different compliance requirements.
• Managing various leave and contract types required extensive knowledge and operations work. Automation was necessary in order to guide clients through a policy creation process.

Client Interviews

Market Analysis

Goals

Here’s a brief summary of the key objectives we set to achieve in creating a robust, simple, and truly global time-off product:

Policy Management

Enable managers to efficiently oversee various policies, allowing them to search, edit, create, and delete as needed.

Streamlining the Global Policy Creation Process

To make policy creation easier, we needed a clear step-by-step form flow that guides our clients through the complexity of setting up their global policies. This includes using simple language without jargon and providing templates that pre-fill the form with legally compliant information.

Simplified Policy Assignment Process

Clients need the ability to assign time-off policies to employees individually and by different groupings. They should be able to automatically assign policies based on contract type, country, compensation, and any other necessary data points in the future.

Design

Policy Management

For scalability and clarity, I decided that a simple table with clear filtering was the best way for managers to get a high-level view of their company's various policies. This structure is designed to work for both startups with few policies and enterprise clients with over ten policies for each country in their workforce.

The table provides essential information for managers to differentiate each policy, including compliance status, the applicable country, and allowance amounts. Users can easily preview the full content of a policy before assigning or editing it by simply clicking on the policy.

Policy creation

Configuring and assigning time-off policies for large multinational companies could take months of work for an HR team—without the tool we built. The secret? A simple UI with clear, straightforward copy and a compliance-first workflow that empowers global operations.

First up, the templates.

To streamline the policy creation process, we developed a template system. When a client clicks on "Add New Policy," the first step is a marketplace screen where they can choose to create a policy from scratch—though they are advised against this—or browse through a selection of pre-vetted templates for each country and leave type.

Users can preview the configurations of each template and pre-fill their form with that information.

Of course, the real magic happens backstage. In order for the templates system to work, we also designed and built a policy validation tool, accessible only to our internal team, for them to review and update the legal parameters per each of the policies.

Now, the flow.

The number of configurations required for a time-off policy can be overwhelming, so my goal was to minimize decision-making for the user. While we anticipated that most users would apply a pre-made template and bypass the configuration process, I designed a form structure that could accommodate any user persona.

The key was to divide the form flow into five sections—Details, Allowance, Payouts, Requests, and Approvals. Within each step, configurations were made as dynamic as possible. Users are initially exposed only to the essential information. As they fill out the form and reveal more advanced features, the necessary options are presented.

Language was also crucial in this design. Terms like “lump sum” were simplified to “All-at-once time off,” and “accrued” became “earned.” We tested each section with users both familiar and unfamiliar with the industry to optimize how the platform communicated complex concepts. Through this process, we discovered much simpler ways to express ourselves.

Policy assignments

After a policy is created, the client’s main concern is how they will now be able to provide them to their employees. For this, I designed a powerful feature that should be able to grow with our customer base and future requirements.

For a small company, it would be simple to assign policies individually to each of their corresponding users, but large, global companies required a way to automatically assign, and un-assign employees based on a set of conditions. To achieve this, I designed a conditional system with an auto-assignment toggle and at a latter step, a way for clients to review users individually and consider exceptions.

In short, this combination of features allows HR executives to set up who belongs to a specific policy and who will belong to it as soon as they are hired.

Results

After a year of design and development, Deel’s time-off product has undergone a significant transformation. It now has the capability to onboard global companies with diverse contract types and includes powerful automation features that will support its continued scalability. Some of the key impacts this tool has had on the business include:

• It became a key product that enabled Deel to onboard its #1 largest client. Beyond the substantial direct revenue impact, it has opened the door for notable growth in the enterprise sector.
• We identified that creating and assigning a time-off policy was the pivotal "aha!" moment for clients using our HRIS system. The launch of this product marked a clear turning point, significantly boosting adoption of the HR software among clients who previously used Deel primarily for payroll purposes.