If your holiday management feels complicated, you need to read this…

The daffodils and magnolias are showing their colours and the clocks have gone forwards, reminding us that even the greyest, wettest and longest winter eventually gives way to the lighter evenings and bluer skies of spring. But, as our thoughts inevitably turn towards escaping somewhere warm and sunny, you’d better hope you’ve got a reliable holiday management system in place for your employees. Because if you haven’t, holiday planning and tracking can feel like a complex, arduous task requiring 10 hands, military-level precision and the strategic mind of a chess master.

Cost of living crisis or not, everyone looks forward to their much-needed holidays, whether they decide to jet off somewhere hot or opt for a staycation in the UK. And rightly so – the work hard, play hard mantra is a good one to live by, and we all benefit from the chance to recharge our batteries every now and then, to spend time with the people we love and to prioritise rest and self-care, so we avoid burnout later down the line.

So, with the Easter holidays just around the corner, which usually opens the floodgates to holiday season, perhaps now’s the right time to take a good look at your current holiday management system, and see if there’s a way to make tracking your workers’ holidays a much quicker and smoother process.

So, first things first: are you still using paper request forms? If so, we cannot urge you strongly enough to rethink this approach and swap it for a cloud-based system such as the one offered by uAttend. There are so many problems with paper request forms – not least the fact they get lost, forgotten, misread or simply not handed in until it’s too late. Then there are the word-of-mouth requests, “My line manager said it was fine…”, those kinds of things. You know what we mean, it happens all the time. Paper request forms also usually mean that it falls on the shoulders of one staff member to process them, and then to inform employees whether their requests have been approved, or not. So much time can get lost this way – time that, as a business, you cannot really afford to be losing.

So how can uAttend revolutionise your holiday management? In almost every way you can think of, and some you may not have considered as well! As part of your time and attendance software, uAttend offers you a completely new way to manage your staff holidays, benefitting both you and your employees, who will love the speed, ease and, above all, transparency of doing things a different way.

Picture this: Instead of those ghastly paper forms we were talking about, your employees would be able to use their uAttend app or web login to access their timesheets and to then request the days they would like to take off. When the requests are sent, the relevant line manager or supervisor can check to see whether other staff members have already got the same dates booked off, before granting or refusing the request. This means you won’t suddenly find yourselves being short-staffed or missing two workers with a specific skillset, for example. Employees will be able to see exactly how many days they’ve taken already and also their remaining balance to date, which is displayed as hours rather than days. You, as an employer, can use uAttend not only for holiday requests, but also for general absence management, to classify time off into paid and unpaid categories, set pay rates if it’s public holiday work, manage sick leave more effectively etc.

Holiday Management is actually just one of the many key features of uAttend. Together, these really can completely transform your business operation, saving you so much paperwork, admin time and, ultimately, money.

For more information, book a free online demo or fill out our contact form to let us you’re your question and we’ll happily get back to you.