Effective time off management contributes to higher business productivity. It allows employees to plan and take vacations in an orderly manner, enjoy enough personal time, stay energized, and show their best at work. It also lets managers track employees’ leaves as accurately and efficiently as possible, improving the practices of workforce capacity planning, benefits management, and payroll.
So, what do you require to manage time off in a proper way? Among all other things, you surely need to know how to log your team members’ days off and process their leave requests well.
To help you out with these tasks, we made a simple time off application form. Don’t hesitate to download and use it at your company. And read the text below to find out how to utilize our template to your greatest advantage.
Why You Need a Simple Time Off Application Form
Leave request management differs from one company to another. Some businesses undertake an informal approach and agree with workers on their vacation plans just verbally. In contrast, others prefer a highly formalized method. They ask employees to fill in plenty of forms, follow strict protocols, and take into account multiple rules.
However, neither of the above approaches is perfect. In the case of the former, you will tend to forget about your workers’ planned vacations. And as for the latter, it requires you to invest a massive amount of time in leave management. Plus, it exhausts employees with redundant administrative demands.
Overall, using a simple format is the best way to handle leave requests. With our template, none of your team members’ leave requests will be left undocumented. And in the meantime, it will help you eliminate unnecessary complexities from the management process.
How to Apply the Time Off Request Form by actiPLANS
It takes merely five easy steps to implement our template:
- Download the form and customize it if necessary. You may delete some leave types from the provided list or add a few other categories that you usually use to track workers’ time off.
- Ask your employees to fill in the form and send it over to you some time in advance before the requested leave period.
- Review each new request, check the asked-for dates, and if your business can afford to let a team member be absent for the requested period, approve the form and share the good news with that employee.
- In case you consider rejecting a leave request, you need to explain your reasons for doing so. The least you can do is to include a manager’s note in a reviewed form and send it back to a team member to let them know why they cannot be absent for the selected timeframe. This simple action will alleviate the negative impacts of rejection.
- Always mark the approved time off periods on your team’s vacation calendar in order to see who’s going to be absent, when and for how long. Then, plan your workloads and projects considering the scheduled leaves.
Streamline Time Off Request Approval with actiPLANS
Our time off application form is a simple and effective absence management tool. However, it works best merely in small teams and is largely based on manual data input. So, if you want to speed up leave request processing even more and make it as streamlined as can be, actiPLANS is your go-to solution.
This intelligent absence management software contains employee self-service functionality that lets the members of your team plan vacations and request days off quickly and conveniently. Next, whenever new leave requests are created in the system, you get notified via email and can proceed to approve or reject them fast. And if that’s not enough, actiPLANS allows you to automate the approval of some leave requests. For instance, if an employee needs to be absent for just a few hours or a day, they can do that without your direct involvement and approval – they simply need to leave a note in their actiPLANS account and, after that, may feel free to do their thing.
Enjoy all the benefits of streamlined leave request management with actiPLANS. Sign up for a free 30-day trial today and check it out in practice.
