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Originally Posted On: https://www.e-days.com/news/staff-holiday-planner
Manually managing different types of leave in an organisation can often be time-consuming, inaccurate and disjointed. Implementing a staff holiday planner that makes the processes so much easier, quicker and more streamlined takes away much of admin burden and ensures your organisation is on top of managing employee leave in the smartest way possible.
In this blog, we’ve compiled 5 benefits of using a staff holiday planner or annual leave tracker.
5 benefits of using a staff holiday planner
Make requesting and approving staff holiday easy
One of the key benefits of using a staff leave system is how easy it makes requesting, approving and recording holiday. It provides a much better employee experience, as it eliminates the need to send an email to make a holiday request, and wait for a response which may take several days to appear or be overlooked altogether.
Employees also have full visibility of their holiday entitlement in one system, so they can see exactly how much holiday they have booked and how much of their allowance remains. This helps to provide employees with more ownership and responsibility for their holiday entitlement. They can decide how and when they want to use it, and with the aid of personal and group calendars, they are able to work their leave dates around those of their colleagues.
For people managers, a leave management system like edays will send a notification through to show that a holiday request has been made. Managers can then log onto the mobile app or desktop platform to view the request, check that it doesn’t clash with someone else in the team, and then approve or deny the request accordingly. All with just a few taps and no email chains to resurface.
Provide complete visibility of leave to better plan resources
Having a staff holiday planner in place is a much more efficient way to plan resources, rather than relying on spreadsheets or paper to try and organise everyone’s leave.
With a system like edays, you can view how much leave employees are using and when, so resources can be planned effectively to make sure workflows, projects and busier periods are not disrupted.
Having sight of everyone’s holiday allowance will also show individuals who aren’t using up as much of their holiday allowance as perhaps they ought to be. If someone hasn’t taken a break from work for several weeks or even months, it may be time for their people manager to step in and encourage them to booking some annual leave. Taking regularly breaks from work is essential in remaining productive – trying to ‘run on empty’ actually diminishes focus and output, leading to presenteesim and burnout.
Avoid clashes in employee leave
Utilising a staff holiday booking system helps dramatically in avoiding clashes in employee leave. If you’re using spreadsheets or paper to record leave usage, then spotting whether too many employees have the same dates booked off can be easily missed.
A staff holiday planner like edays will notify you to any clashes in leave – and rules can be put in place to set up these alerts. For example, if 3 people within a 4-person team all want to book the same week off work, and that will cause a resourcing issues, the system will let you know.
Manage leave for part-time and full-time employees, in days or hours, in one system
Often one of the challenges for organisations that have part-time and full-time employees is separating out their different leave allowances and staying on top of how much of their entitlement is being used.
So, having a leave management system in place that automatically calculates the leave entitlements for both part-time and full-time employees is a huge help. Time off can also be calculated and booked off in hours or days – a big plus point if you offer TOIL (time off in lieu).
Ditch the manual processes and automate your approach
Automating your approach to managing leave will reduce time that is currently being spent on manual processes, as well as improving the leave experience for employees. Whether you have a mix of part-time and full-time employees, those working shifts, or individuals who have enhanced long-service leave entitlements, it can all be managed in one system.
With edays, you can set up custom leave types too, so if you offer additional annual leave days in the form of wellbeing days or mental health days, these can be easily logged separately.
To learn more about deciding which staff holiday planner is right for you, take a look at our blog: What to look for when choosing a leave management system.
