Co-ordinate staff holiday and planned absence more effectively
Many businesses are aware of the pent-up demand for holiday across their workforce. It’s been a challenging year and across the UK as we make good progress towards achieving more normality and freedom in our daily lives, it’s understandable that so many of us are now thinking about taking time off from work.
Various announcements about the prospect of travel both in the UK and abroad have prompted plenty of people to finally start making plans for holidays over the coming weeks and months. And all of this presents a potential issue for line managers and HR staff to deal with.
Clearly, it’s a necessity for the business to still be able to function effectively whilst staff make full use of their holiday entitlement – so it’s important to be able to identify who will be working before agreeing to who can take planned absence. With lots of employees potentially asking for a holiday within a short period of time, or even at the same time, being able to make the right decisions quickly whilst still treating each employee requests fairly is crucial. Getting it right is also vital for company morale – especially now as businesses and the economy are trying to recover from the impact of the pandemic. Perhaps now more than ever, you need your workforce to be feeling positive and engaged from a business perspective. Having the ability to respond quickly and confidently regarding holiday is a good way to keep employees happy.
Software is a logical solution - and it’s value for money too
The key to moving to a more efficient and effective holiday management process that manages everyone’s expectations fairly is using a software solution. Not only does holiday and absence software ensure your business can effectively manage and coordinate time off for all employees – but it also provides additional benefits too. The opportunity for individuals to ‘self-serve’ using a holiday management software when booking their holiday helps to simplify and streamline the process rather than creating additional administrative work for line managers or HR. Collaborative planning ensures individuals aren’t simply booking holidays in isolation without understanding who else might be off or how the business might be impacted. And the ability to review planned absence across a team or even the entire business enables managers to optimise attendance and workforce management much more effectively too.
And there’s even more to consider… The Access software available to facilitate more effective holiday and absence management is a key part of a more wide-ranging and comprehensive workforce management solution that enables managers and HR to adopt a more data-driven and evidence-based approach to decision-making. Data-driven insight is a fundamental approach many businesses are already adopting across multiple areas, not just their HR functions. And the drive towards more automation of administrative processes in HR has also been given a further boost from the huge rise in remote working as a direct result of the pandemic.
Now is the time. Changing trends in working practice, a shift towards employee self-service options for HR and admin driven functions, and a need to make the most efficient and quick decisions on a day-to-day basis are great reasons to take a look at HR and business software tools for optimising workforce management.
Access can help. Find out more about workforce management.
