Vacation management: how can I plan vacations for my employees?

The more employees you have, the harder it will get to manage vacations.

In the middle of August, some people take the opportunity to be with their relatives, with friends or maybe to travel to exotic countries. Whatever your plans are for the summer, if you are in charge of vacation management in your company, you already know all the headaches that this task might generate for you and for those workers. Today we will see how you can make vacation management easier for you, by having great control and getting the company to continue functioning properly.

How to plan vacations for ypur employees?

Let’s start at the beginning. What are the company regulations regarding holidays?

Naturally, every company has some features and standard rules established. Working in an office, from 9:00 to 15:00 is very different from working in a night pub with buckets of beer and pool tables, but there are some general rules that coincide in all jobs:

• First, vacations need to be agreed in the contract or relevant agreement. Bear in mind that this period should not be less than 30 calendar days (including weekends).
• In most companies, this agreement contains a period of time in which it is possible to request vacations, for example from the 1st of July to the 15th of September. It may also include rules such as mandatory days in which you must choose vacations, like 10-15 days in summer or 4 days in winter. You can find other rules such as not being able to choose individual days or not being able to choose every Friday, among other possibilities. Therefore, the employee vacation calendar is well defined in each company. But, like in most places, there are always exceptions, and at least in Spain, there are situations where you can have other labour rights like for example: getting holidays after a wedding, or when a child has just been born, or when moving houses, or when a relative dies, etc.
• But what it is common, in all businesses, is that an agreement between the boss or the HR department and the worker has been made, and these vacations cannot be replaced by a payment unless you have been fired, but that is a different story…

And now we get to the issue that concerns us, if someone wants to get holidays, that someone should inform the boss or the people in charge, in advance, depending on the company size, the time in advance may vary from 2 months to weeks … The reason why it is not possible to choose any day is very simple. Imagine that in your marketing department there are five people. The company does not close in August and you guys have to continue working, but all of you have taken the first two weeks of August. You have to make a last minute major campaign, but no one is the office… I guess you already know what will happen when everyone gets back from holidays…

Up to this point, everything seems logical, but how can I deal with vacation management so that the employees are more or less satisfied? I can tell you already that Excel is a complicated thing and organising this with a slate-calendar is difficult as well. If we are talking about a large company, this is completely impossible. To solve this problem, software for vacation management was created.

Before talking about it, let’s see 6 points to facilitate work and life balance:

• Clear company policies in which all employees know their agreement: If it is possible to choose any month for holidays, the starting and ending dates of these holidays must be defined.
• Time is critical: if 50 people tell you, a week before, that they are going to go on vacation, this will cause bad organisation, so letting the boss or people in charge know in advance, should be something that the company should tell the workers. Depending on the size of the company, this size will be larger or smaller.
• Flexibility is important: In the past, august was the famous month for holidays, but now holidays can go from June to September. This makes organizing holidays much easier. In this case flexibility is very positive.
• Bear in mind those in charge of each department: Here it is important that the employees and managers are clear about how many people can go simultaneously on holiday without any problems. If you are the HR manager, you should organize every department and you will be provided with all the information. The idea is that employees negotiate and make agreements.
• Favouritism is not allowed: It is true that in many companies, when holiday dates coincide, the person that has been longer in the company or with family issues, is the first one to choose. But what it is important is that if some rules are set, do not make changes for a particular person. If you do this, then you can get conflicts and problems within the company.
• Use Help desk software for vacation management: In order to achieve this, you can use software for vacation management so that it helps you make everything a bit more clear. Furthermore, if you think there is any failure when planning; you will be able to check it as soon as possible and act on it in order to fix it.

What is software for vacation management?

First let’s have a look at the meaning of help desk, help desk is a tool that helps you when managing your business, an example of this would be Pandora ITSM. There are different tools in help desk, such as inventory, project management, a fraction for invoices and customers, and another one for the employees and another one for incident management through tickets, among other possibilities. It is also very good to have a calendar for vacation management, for organising who is on leave, as well as projects or unjustified absences.

Those people, who are interested in this, may make a request to the boss for a date on the office computer, on the phone or the tablet. The manager will see very quickly and easily what dates are available, so it will be possible to be organised. This way you can easily avoid clashing dates between your employees, so that they do not choose the same dates, in order for this dates to be properly distributed.

Once you are organised when managing vacations, you can introduce dates in Pandora ITSM, where you will see the vacations of your employees. Both employees and managers of each department will have access to this calendar.

In Pandora ITSM you will be able to check the monthly report of each employee, and you will be able to have a look at their vacation days, holidays, projects that have been undertaken, teleworking etc.

And as we mentioned earlier, you will be able to see the vacation days of all of the employees in a single calendar, avoiding clashes and incidents among employees.

If you want more information about Pandora ITSM , you can access our website or keep going through our blog.