A well-organized process of leave management comes with many benefits. It ensures fair treatment of employees and prevents burnout in them while helping your business maintain an optimal level of productivity at all times.
In contrast, a failure to handle leave requests adequately may result in costly payroll errors, undermine employee well-being and pave a path to the wrong side of the law.
Thus, if you want your business and team members to thrive, you have no other choice but to establish a simple yet effective leave management process — you need to make sure everything runs smoothly, no mistakes or delays are taking place, and it’s easy for everyone involved in the leave management process to perform the required actions.
actiPLANS is of tremendous assistance in this regard:
- It allows employees to submit leave requests in merely a few clicks,
- Promptly notifies managers when somebody asks for time off,
- And provides them with all the data and tools needed for a quick response.
So, let’s explore how actiPLANS can simplify and streamline leave management in your team and see which benefits it may produce for your company.
What Is a Leave Request?
A leave request is a formal request to take time off from work. This can be for a full / partial day or for an extended period of time such as vacation.
A typical leave request contains the following information:
- The date(s) of expected absence
- An explanation of why an employee needs time off (e.g., family emergency, doctor’s appointment, etc.)
- Whether the leave is paid or unpaid
- The employee’s contact information
- Any other relevant information that the company requires
- A supervisor’s approval signature and notes
Leave requests can be made in writing or using any digital / online tool of choice. And in case you prefer to manage your team’s leave requests via simple electronic documents, we have a lovely leave request template for you!
Ask your employees to fill it out before sending their leave requests your way via email or any other communication platform adopted in your company. Then, quickly review and approve or reject the submitted leave request and forward it back to the sender.
Simple!
To download our leave requests template for free, just click the button below.
What Is Leave Request Management?
The leave request management process comprises four basic steps:
- An employee plans their time off and submits a request, usually through an official form, formal email or another standard method of choice.
- A manager reviews the request. And before deciding to approve or decline it, they often analyze some essential info: employee time off history, workforce capacity for the selected leave period, team workloads, etc.
- The manager notifies the employee about the final leave request status, which can be done via email, chat or face-to-face conversation.
- The manager logs all the changes in employee PTO balance to keep an accurate track of payroll data and make certain neither the business nor its team members lose their well-earned money.
Such a four-step procedure seems pretty straightforward, right?
However, it’s impossible to perform all the above actions quickly and effectively when your team is big enough, but the whole leave management process is decentralized and run on paper.
To speed things up and avoid troublesome mistakes, you need to embrace automation and manage all leave-related matters via a single platform.
And that’s what makes actiPLANS your best choice here.
Main Benefits of Using actiPLANS for Leave Management
- Convenience of use — actiPLANS provides employees with full access to their time off balance data. They can easily see how their PTO was accrued and submit leave requests in merely a few seconds. Self-service functionality not only makes it convenient to handle some of the most vital HR issues but also allows for building greater trust in management.
- Higher efficiency — actiPLANS can be configured to auto-approve requests for some types of leaves. It also accrues employees’ time off balances on its own and rids you of the need to perform any manual calculations.
- Faster manager response — Even if you don’t plan to automate the approval of leave requests, actiPLANS still makes the entire process much faster, thanks to prompt notifications about new leave requests and a handy one-click approval feature.
- Informed decision-making — actiPLANS keeps all your absence management records safely in one place. And whenever you want to review and analyze your team’s time off data, you can simply run one of many insightful reports.
Managing Leave Time with actiPLANS
So, what must be done to streamline leave request management with actiPLANS and how to gain all the benefits it has to offer?
For starters, it’s important to set your own PTO accrual rules in the system and create all the leave types you want to track. Be sure to check out this post for more information on how to succeed with that and read the text below to learn what to do next:
How to request a leave of absence
The Leave Scheduling interface is all you need to plan days off and submit leave requests in an effortless and highly efficient way. It clearly shows how many days off you had, have or will have on your PTO balance throughout the employment period.
You can view this info either on a small display at the upper corner of the calendar or by hovering over any date on the My Leave Time Requests timeline with the mouse cursor:
It takes only four simple steps to submit a leave request via My Leave Time Requests:
- Select preferable dates on the timeline to open the leave request form,
- Make sure you have enough PTO on your balance for the chosen dates,
- Indicate which type of leave you want to take,
- Add a comment for your manager if you want to clarify some points.
After you hit the Submit Request button, your manager will be immediately notified about a new incoming leave request via email. And whenever your leave request gets approved or rejected, you will be alerted at once as well.
Another way to tell the status of your leave request is by the coloring: pending leave requests are highlighted in the hatch pattern, while the approved ones take on a solid color.
How to approve leave requests
To approve or decline leave requests in actiPLANS, you need to do the following:
1. Assign manager permissions
Decide who should be responsible for time off request approval in your team and grant them with the Manage Leave Time Requests permission. It authorizes managers to access other users’ PTO data and process it in the system.
2. Configure auto-approval
Would you like some types of time off to be processed automatically? You can play around with leave type settings and create some time off categories that won’t require manager approval at all. Plus, you can choose to auto-approve or auto-reject leave requests upon their starting dates, which will help you make sure no leave request remains unprocessed by the due period even if an assigned manager somehow neglects it.
3. Check on pending leave requests
Your employees’ leave requests are available for review in an easy-to-read list:
It has a flexible configuration and allows you to do the following things:
- Filter leave requests by users, leave types, related time off balances and current statuses
- Sort them in multiple ways (by periods, user groups, etc.)
- Approve, reject or delete leave requests in merely a few clicks, both in bulk and individually
- Edit time off requests
- Attach comments to approved and rejected requests in case you need to clarify something for employees
4. Run reports to analyze absenteeism trends
actiPLANS reports display how much time off was taken by your team members over any period and which leave types were the most common among them during that span. These reports demonstrate whether some of your team members are overworking and facing the risk of burnout or, on the contrary, go absent too frequently. They show how productively your employees use their time and hence inform your decisions about request approval and absenteeism prevention.
Conclusion
Effortless and effective leave request management:
- Improves employee satisfaction,
- Promotes staff well-being,
- Ensures impeccable legal compliance,
- And reduces business costs.
To establish such a beneficial leave management process in your company, you need actiPLANS. This intelligent software solution includes automation, employee self-service and a user-friendly interface. You can integrate it into your workflows with incredible ease and don’t have to spend hours learning how to implement it.
Subscribe for a free online trial now and make sure of it yourself and get ready to be delighted with the results.
