EASY HOLIDAY LEAVE & PLANNED ABSENCE MANAGEMENT

Entitled holidays and leave are essential for employee health and wellbeing – but holidays and other planned absences need careful management.

Managing holiday leave and other types of planned leave is an issue for all organisations, large and small, touching every employee and many functions. Whoever manages it can find it not only an extra administrative headache but also a minefield of resourcing, payroll and employment legal challenges.

In large organisations, the task of keeping track has traditionally fallen to the HR team, while departmental heads, team leaders and line managers get directly involved, signing off requests and balancing their workforce resources – and occasionally refereeing competing requests. In SMEs it can become a burden for administrators, managers, or even small business leaders.

Empactis can help any company, regardless of size, to save time, reduce risk, and heal the headache of holiday and planned leave management.

Holidays are part of a bigger absence picture

Absence is always a management hurdle – and many of the extra costs, risks and performance problems it can bring will happen regardless of whether absence is a planned holiday, an unplanned absence or a sudden sickness absence.

You need a platform that is optimised to manage a broad range of absence types and help you manage them in an efficient, structured and transparent way. Then you can support employees, their line managers, and enable the seamless exchange of information with HR and finance to ensure everything works smoothly.

 

You need the full picture of your absence challenge to make informed workforce decisions – including all types of planned leave:

  • Holiday leave – entitlements can vary widely, varying with role, original contract terms and length of service
  • Pro rata holiday leave – the statutory holiday leave and associated pay calculations for part-time staff can be tricky, and some of your contractors may also have holiday entitlements
  • Flexible working – flexible working and flexible benefits schemes can add a whole new layer of variation as individuals select the combination of working hours or benefits, including holiday days, that suits them best
  • Emergency leave – such as doctors’ visits and dependents leave
  • Statutory leave – such as maternity and paternity leave
  • Discretionary leave – such as training absences and sabbaticals

Spreadsheets fall short on holiday planning

Monster, multi-tabbed holiday leave planning spreadsheets should be a thing of the past. Sadly, they are often the norm, chosen as a common format familiar to every department.

Spreadsheets were never designed to hold this information, keep it secure, nor to enable the clear and structured workflow that good planned leave management demands.

The flow of information about planned absences including holiday leave may start with employees and their line managers but must often connect quickly to team or departmental management for workforce planning. It must constantly connect to HR for record keeping, as well as to finance so that holiday pay entitlements are correctly synched with payroll – and can be concluded accurately should a staff member leave.

Empactis Absence Manager enables you to manage planned and unplanned absence seamlessly alongside the Office 365 tools that your staff, managers and key functions use every day for communication, calendaring and their documents, forms and templates.

Make planned leave clear, current and visible

Any absence can bring challenges – you have to ensure that resource gaps don’t interrupt operation, planning staff reassignments, and sometimes recruiting short-term or interim replacements.

Keeping a clear view of current and complete absences can be very difficult – but without it, you can’t manage all its implications and effects. Informed workforce planning and decision-making requires a clear view of both planned and unplanned absence at the organisational level.

Line managers need to see at a glance the exact absence picture among their team, so they can make appropriate and informed responses – whether that’s to find a temp, reassign a resource, or approve a stack of holiday requests.

Employees need to know the status of their own holidays and leave applications too. Even with personal holidays, many staff don’t track their days carefully. That can mean a constant stream of requests from staff to line managers, or from line managers to HR, to confirm unused allowances or update on planned leave admin.

Embracing a platform that is designed to creating an intuitive, easy to manage absence management workflow gives the business and its HR and finance partners a complete, current, clear and accurate overview of holidays and planned absences – it is a foundation for smart decision-making.

Absence Manager for Planned Leave

Absence Manager from Empactis helps organisations manage planned absence and holiday leave as well as unplanned absence and sickness leave…

  • Employees benefit from an intuitive platform and processes for holiday booking and planned leave applications, generating immediate visibility for managers and easy integration into review and approval process
  • Line managers gain the information they need to engage with staff over holiday plans and leave needs, as well as up-to-date and accurate overviews of upcoming absence, so they can make smart real-time resourcing decisions
  • HR partners and executive leaders can see, query and make informed workforce decisions based on a complete and accurate set of data around all types of absence, from unplanned and sickness absences to planned and holiday leave