Staff time off scheduling may not seem like much, however, it’s essential.
As a business owner or manager, you’ll definitely remember that feeling of panic you get when you receive a leave notification from one or more of your employees.
It’s quite understandable that you panic every time this happens because every employee in your organisation plays a specific role.
So, when they go on leave, they leave a vacuum of responsibilities that need to be filled.
This could result in your team being overworked and less productive.
There’ll also be a marked inability to meet set deadlines and manage tasks effectively and an overall drop in work efficiency.
What is staff time off scheduling?
This is the process of planning, managing, and tracking time off taken by employees.
This time taken off includes holidays, sick leaves, maternity leaves, etc.
In some companies, the HR department handles staff leave scheduling manually.
However, this opens up the door and increases the possibility of employee management challenges.
Because of this, most companies globally are now pivoting to using online holiday planner tools as their employee management solution.
These tools offer significant benefits.
1. Cross-training
As a manager, one significant staff leave challenge you’ll face is finding suitable temporary replacements.
But there’s an easy way to stay ahead of this: cross-training.
Cross-training involves training employees in multiple roles so they can easily provide cover.
This, in turn, keeps you on track to meet and even smash your immediate goals.
Cross-training can also help you keep your team flexible and improve your productivity.
2. Identify seasons
Did you know that there are seasons or periods in which your company has been recording elevated holiday requests?
Take some time to go through your records, and you’ll find that this is indeed the case.
Streamlining your staff time off scheduling process means you’ll have to thoroughly identify these periods.
When you know to expect an increased number of requests, you can plan better.
This will then ensure you remain on track to completing your goals.
Similarly, you’ll also want to find out your businesses’ peak and trough levels of customer engagement.
This refers to you going over your books to pinpoint particular periods where you usually experience high demand.
Once you’ve identified these “seasons,” you can arrange for more staff hires or better holiday allocation.
This will help ensure your business remains satisfactorily staffed to handle daily operations.
3. Leverage technology
You are definitely aware that technology has led to many changes and improvements in different areas like the internet, music, and so on.
However, did you know there have also been technological breakthroughs in human resources or, more specifically, leave scheduling?
This is, of course, referring to the use of online holiday planners for employee leave scheduling.
As mentioned earlier, online holiday planner tools are gaining widespread acceptance.
This is primarily because they offer lots of pretty amazing benefits that are a guarantee to transform your staff leave scheduling practices.
4. Deadlines and reminders
One other excellent approach to streamlining your staff time off scheduling is to invest in sending timely reminders.
Once you have identified periods of high work demand, you’ll need to set leave request deadlines.
Then, you’ll periodically send out reminders to employees about the deadline date for submitting leave requests.
This helps you ensure you know just how many workers you have available for that particular period.
This will, in turn, make the planning process easier on you since you won’t have to deal with sudden understaffing emergencies.
5. Always have a backup
If your business is big enough and you can afford it, you should consider hiring some temporary staff.
This is because, despite your best efforts, you may still be unable to account for some unexpected occurrences.
Having backups like a clear task redistribution plan or temporary staff means you’ll still remain in an optimal position to meet your goals.
Conclusion
As a manager or business owner, staff time off scheduling is one area you want to pay utmost attention to.
This is because it significantly impacts your ability to meet your business goals and targets.
With an online holiday planner, staff leave scheduling becomes much easier, and your company becomes substantially more productive.
