Many modern companies don’t have established leave policies, which causes problems and misunderstandings. Employees are not sure how to request sick leave or a vacation, who should they contact, should they write a formal request, or contact their manager in the messenger.
The same applies to human resource teams. Should they crawl through dozens of official leave requests or should they pull up leave requests from notes, emails, and messengers? How should they notify employees whether their requests were accepted or declined? Should they compile a formal notice for each team member or contact everyone face-to-face?
These questions often stay unanswered in many companies, which gives a headache to project managers and HR teams. Read on to learn how to automate leave requests in your company.
Understanding Leave Policies
Your human resource team should have an established leave policy so that employees know how to request holidays and how their requests will be treated. It’s essential that you and your team follow the same framework: who they should ask for a leave, how, and when they submit their requests.
Who? Who your employees should ask for leave? Who of the other team members should be informed about it? Should they consult their manager before they ask for a leave? Or can they directly contact the HR team?
How? Every company should have a clear leave request policy to avoid errors and misunderstandings. How should your employees make the requests? Should they write an absence request letter, write an email, make a phone call, or meet the HR team face to face to discuss the details? Or if your company automated these procedures, they should use some software?
When? When your employees need to take a sick leave, can they do that right away? Or if they need to take annual leave, how much notice period should your employees give before the start date?
How to Manage Leave Requests
Most companies cut corners on leave management software. So, HR managers have to pull up leave requests from notes, paper applications, emails, and messengers, manually add them to a single place, most often — Excel spreadsheets, calculate the PTO balances and leave allowances manually. Not only this takes hours to complete but manual leave management is prone to human errors. So, if you automate these routines in your company, your HR managers will engage in their professional responsibilities, not tedious calculations and paperwork.
Let’s say your company implemented actiPLANS to automate the absence management process. Let’s see how it’s going to work.
1. Automate Leave Requests
Employees request sick leaves, vacation leave, or any other leave that you previously set up in the parameters. They choose a number of days, pick the leave type, and see how it’s going to affect their PTO balance.
2. Automate Leave Compliance
After the employee submitted their request, it’s awaiting approval. If you picked automatic approval for this employee, then their request will be automatically approved. If you assigned a leave time manager for this user, they will get a notification and approve or reject the incoming request.
3. Automate PTO Calculations
Once you made the first setup, defined the leave types, accrual rules and corporate schedules, the system will do all the PTO calculations. In case you need more control of it, actiPLANS allows you to modify balances manually.
4. Gather Reports
That’s it. You don’t need to pull up leave requests or calculate the balances manually — actiPLANS does all the job for you. If you need leave statistics, you can see past leaves of individual users in a calendar-like layout or monitor and download leave time and balance reports.
In case you need to see how particular events affected the PTO balance, you can access detailed individual reports. If your actiPLANS license is integrated with actiTIME time management software, then you can see how undertime and overtime affected the PTO balance of your employees.
See? We bet Excel sheets can’t handle this amount of details, visuals, and automation. So, why will you benefit from leave management software?
Leave Management Made Easy
With leave management software, your HR team and employees can be sure that the leave request procedure is easy and hassle-free. Most tools share leave schedules between the whole team, so team members and project managers are aware of the absence schedules and plan their work accordingly. Your HR teams no longer need to deal with official leave requests, calculate PTO balances, and compose leave schedules in Excel sheets.
actiPLANS offers many benefits for your business:
- Transparency. All past leaves and future leave requests are stored in a single place and shared across the teams.
- Increased accuracy. No more manual pull-ups and calculations — all requests and PTO balances are safely stored in one place.
- Access to staff availability. Project managers and team members can see if their colleagues are available and when they are planning to go on vacations so that they manage the workload and plan their vacation leaves accordingly.
- Increased awareness of vacation policies. With all the leaves and leave requests in one place, employees know about the approval procedures and their PTO balances.
- Audits become a lot easier. HR teams no longer need to manually calculate PTOs or leave allowances — once you set it up according to your company’s policies, actiPLANS does all the work.
