Time off scheduling is an activity that every employee enjoys. However, it can quickly become a nightmare if your company has an overly complex leave requesting procedure with multiple forms to fill in and a time-consuming approval process.
To keep your staff members sane and pleased with how you handle HR, you should strive to make time off scheduling as fast and effortless as possible. And in case you succeed with this task, you will improve employee satisfaction, get error-free team absence data and deepen your insight into workforce capacity issues.
So, what are the signs of a perfect time off scheduling solution?
They are automation, employee self-service and a user-friendly interface, which you can readily find in our leave management software, actiPLANS. Read this post to get to know how to schedule time off and track all the staff absences with its help.
How to Schedule Time Off in actiPLANS?
Corporate Schedule is an actiPLANS feature for managing organization-wide holidays and employees’ personal days off. It is available in two convenient formats:
Calendar (aka Corporate Work Schedule)
The calendar interface captures corporate holidays and general workdays your company enjoys throughout the year. This interface has a flexible configuration and may be modified in line with your needs.
You can:
- Add extra holidays to your Corporate Work Schedule manually, just by clicking on any date;
- Or import some national and international holidays in bulk from an iCal file found on the internet.
Beyond that, your Corporate Work Schedule can be synced with external online calendars that support the iCal format. This integration lets you see your scheduled business holidays right in Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook and similar apps.
Timeline (aka My Schedule + Schedule of Colleagues)
The My Schedule interface provides a timeline view of all your personal days off: past, current and future. It displays both the pending leave requests and the approved ones. Besides, it shows how much PTO you’ve earned or will earn on any date of choice.
To check this info, you need to hover over the necessary day in the timeline with the mouse cursor:
In such a simple way, actiPLANS allows you to stay in the know of your current and future PTO balance, which makes time off planning as easy as ABC.
Furthermore, the My Schedule interface offers a straightforward solution to request leaves in merely a few clicks. All you need to do is:
- Highlight the preferable vacation period on the timeline,
- Fill in the pop-up form,
- And hit the Submit Request button.
After this, your manager will be notified about the new leave request via email right away. And if the automated approval feature is activated in your actiPLANS account, the submitted leave request will be endorsed on the spot.
Besides that, employees can locate their teammates’ approved days off and pending leave requests via Schedule of Colleagues:
Depending on the applied data access restrictions, you can see leave requests of either all other actiPLANS users or just those from the same department as you.
In any case, this feature is extremely helpful whenever you need to check on your other employees’ planned absences and understand when they’re going back to work after vacation.
Main Benefits of Time Off Scheduling with actiPLANS
1. Easy access to important info
actiPLANS displays all your PTO balance data, pending leave requests, corporate holidays, past leaves and future time off periods in a convenient format. Plus, you can always review your teammates’ leave requests via Schedule of Colleagues to understand when they’ll be absent and for how long.
2. Improved decision-making
With all the above data at hand, one can make time off decisions in a comfortable and trouble-free way:
- Hover over any date on the My Schedule timeline to see if you have enough earned PTO to arrange a day off.
- Review your history of leaves and navigate towards any period in the future with a single mouse click to choose an optimal vacation term.
- Align your leave requests with those of your colleagues to avoid productivity issues and downtime in your team.
What can make time off planning easier than that?
3. User-friendly interface
actiPLANS’s leave scheduling features are simple to configure and implement. Apply them to request days off in a matter of seconds and enjoy an effortless leave management process.
Simplify Leave Management with actiPLANS
Corporate Schedule is merely one of many actiPLANS features capable of transforming the leave management experience for every member of your team:
- Our software includes built-in automation that frees businesses of the need to calculate PTO and track employee absences manually.
- It has a mobile app that lets users notify colleagues of any changes in their personal schedules on the go and submit leave requests with just a few taps on the screen.
- And of course, actiPLANS includes insightful time off reports that give managers a wealth of information on team absence trends and help them identify any attendance issues early on.
Sounds like something you’re looking for?
It’s time to try out actiPLANS in action! Sign up for a free online trial today and manage leave requests with ease.
