When to get a staff annual leave planner

Most companies underestimate the time and effort it takes to keep track of employee leave. Whether you’re an SME with a small team, or a large enterprise with hundreds of staff, the consequences of a poorly managed holiday calendar can be significant to your business.

The majority of organisations start life manually coordinating leave requests through paper forms, emails and spreadsheets. This can be a cost-effective solution initially, but at what point do the demands of leave management start outweighing the system you have in place?

Let’s take a closer look at when is the best time to get a staff annual leave planner, and why it pays to manage your holiday calendar through online software...

Should SMEs invest in a staff annual leave planner?

As a small business, you may not think that a staff leave planner is necessary to manage employee movements – or you might believe that the cost of software is beyond your budget. However, there are affordable leave management platforms like WhosOff on the market, which make it easy to coordinate leave requirements.

SMEs need to run a lean operation in order to stay profitable, which means every team member’s contribution counts. The consequences of two or three people being off at the same time may be minor in a big enterprise, but for a smaller business, it has a significant impact on productivity.

An online staff annual leave planner makes it easy to see exactly who’s in and who’s off at any point in time. Every member of your business can access the calendar, in order to avoid diary conflicts when submitting leave requests.

Moving over to online leave software also reduces the time, effort and resources it takes to manage staff leave. Requests are digitised, meaning less paperwork for senior staff, with alerts sent to relevant team members when a request is approved or denied. With this approach, your workforce can feel confident that their leave requirements will be dealt with quickly and efficiently, with minimal admin burden.

By moving from a manual system to a staff annual leave planner at SME stage, you can make sure your small team is running like a well-oiled machine, and you have the building blocks in place to continue coordinating the holiday calendar effectively as your business grows. It’s definitely a case of the early bird catching the worm.

How can large companies benefit from a staff annual leave planner?

It’s surprising how many mature businesses are still using in-house systems and manual processes to manage staff leave, as they don’t see transforming their holiday management model as a top priority. However, the impact of a sub-par system can be just as detrimental for a large enterprise as it is for SMEs.

As organisations grow, the volume of paperwork and complexity of calendar management intensifies, and it can be easy for administrative tasks to become burdensome, and mistakes to slip through the net. Your company may have dedicated HR personnel, but processing leave requests shouldn’t take up a significant amount of their workload.

Moving to an online staff annual leave planner takes the responsibility of coordinating holiday requests off HR’s shoulders, giving every team in your business greater transparency over who’s off at any point in time. All requests are channelled through one central platform, automatically notifying staff when actions are required, and when holiday submissions have been approved or denied – so HR personnel aren’t continually being chased for responses.

Importantly, a sophisticated leave management platform like WhosOff can also integrate other types of leave, such as sickness, personal appointments, TOIL and external meetings, with paid leave records, for a fully accurate picture of exactly who is in the office at any point in time. This enables senior personnel to factor in events such as training, pitches and client commitments when approving holiday requests, to ensure you’re not left short-staffed when team members are away.

Finding the right software to support your business growth

There are many staff annual leave planners available on the market, so it’s important to choose the right one. Whatever stage of maturity your company has reached, the key is to find leave management tools that will work for your needs today, but also in the future.

WhosOff is a flexible leave management solution that grows with your business, to provide easy-to-operate online support for businesses for every stage. Whether you’re an SME just looking for a straightforward way to track holiday entitlement, or an enterprise seeking more sophisticated staff management tools, our platform has the tools you need to give employees the time off they want – without it draining your company resources.

And best of all, we offer a low cost solution, ensuring that price is never a barrier to onboarding a staff annual leave planner. In fact, you can try WhosOff for free initially, to see how our software will benefit your business.

Start your free WhosOff trial to improve the way your company manages staff leave.

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