If you’re a team manager, one of your biggest priorities is to guarantee everyone on your team is taken care of. That includes ensuring they have enough time off to relax and rejuvenate – especially during the busy holiday season!
But how can you do that exactly?
We have a free holiday planner template to help you make the vacation scheduling process a lot easier! Don’t hesitate to download it right now and start planning those much-needed employee days off. 🌴
What Is Holiday Planning?
Holiday planning is the process of organizing and preparing for a trip or vacation. This usually involves booking travel arrangements, making reservations for accommodation, deciding on holiday activities, and packing everything you need for the trip. ⛵
But that’s not all!
Vacation scheduling plays a vital part in holiday planning as well. It guarantees that each employee has enough time off to enjoy the planned vacations and that the workplace doesn’t descend into chaos while they’re away.
Arranging everyone’s vacations the right way can be tricky if you have a lot of other commitments as a manager, but there are some proven ways to make it work. And our free holiday planner template is one of them!
How to Use the Free Holiday Planner Template by actiPLANS?
Our template contains four core elements:
- A yearly calendar, divided into 12 straightforward timelines by month.
- A section with time off categories that located above the calendar.
- List of employees.
- A column for total leave time (which is calculated using the COUNTA function).
And here’s how these elements will help you build a perfect leave schedule for your team in Excel:
🟡 Build a color code system
Think up some bespoke leave categories and assign each of them with unique color and letter indications (we made a separate section at the top of the calendar for this purpose).
For instance, the letter V and the color green may indicate long-term vacation, while L and yellow may stand for casual short-term leave. However, you are free to create any other time off types that make sense to you. And in case you need some inspiration, be sure to check out this post.
📃 Make a full list of employees
Add as many new rows to the designated area of the document, but don’t forget to configure the COUNTA formula for each of them. Otherwise, you will have to calculate the total leave time for corresponding employees manually.
To avoid that, simply copy a “Total leave time” cell that we already configured for you and paste it into the ones you added. After this, all the calculations will be performed automatically.
📅 Start scheduling
Possibly the best way to go about this task is to let employees mark off the necessary vacation dates with the right colors and letters themselves.
It will take some explanation on how to use the template on your part (or you can simply share this post with your team to save yourself some time). Plus, you will need to review all the scheduled time off to make sure no overlapping leave requests are there. But in the end, providing employees with full access to the document will boost process efficiency and help to avoid double work.
🎉 That’s it!
By following these three simple steps, you can create an ideal vacation schedule that will make everyone happy and keep your business running like a well-oiled machine.
And if this isn’t convincing enough for you, just keep reading! Below we described the main benefits of effective vacation scheduling + gave some tips on how to make it effective.
3 Key Benefits of Effective Vacation Planning and Scheduling
🕐 Better time management
When you know what’s coming up, you can better manage your time and plan ahead for both work and play. Having a schedule gives you a sense of control over your time and can help reduce stress, which is critical for success at both the individual and organizational levels.
📈 Increased productivity
Studies show that taking regular vacations actually increases productivity at work. That’s because vacations help you come back feeling refreshed and recharged, so you can hit the ground running.
😊 Happiness
It’s no secret that vacations make us happy (no matter if they are meticulously planned or not). And, when you’re happy, it shows in your work. Vacations give you something to look forward to and can help improve your overall mood and outlook on life. Thereby, they improve team morale and contribute to a more positive work environment.
6 Final Tips on How to Improve Vacation Scheduling
- Let your employees know well in advance when they can take a vacation. This will help them plan and avoid any surprises.
- Try to be flexible with employees’ vacation requests. If possible, let them choose the dates that work best for them.
- If you have multiple employees who want to take a vacation at the same time, try to stagger their days off so that there is always someone available to cover.
- Keep track of when employees are taking vacations so that you can plan accordingly and avoid any staffing shortages or productivity drops.
- Encourage employees to take vacations! It’s important for them to recharge and come back refreshed, which is bound to improve business productivity in the long run.
- Use specialized vacation scheduling software to make the process effortless for every person involved.
Take Vacation Scheduling One Step Further
If you still feel like organizing time off is a logistical nightmare and you need a vacation from scheduling employee vacations, we have a perfect solution for you – actiPLANS. This handy solution automates the process to a large degree and takes all the stress out of vacation management.
Just ask employees to schedule their desired dates using a simple visual timeline and actiPLANS will do the rest!
For more information on how to streamline leave management with actiPLANS, please take some time to check out this page.
