, Imagine a world where spreadsheets, holiday cards, wall planners, and Post-It notes no longer dictate annual leave management. In today’s technology-driven landscape, manual processes are indeed becoming obsolete. Yet, surprisingly, many companies still grapple with administrative burdens. In this blog, we will delve into the magic of annual leave management automation, which is all possible using HR tech.
Some features that you can look out for when selecting your new HR system are:
- Flexible Bank Holidays: Flexibility is a critical factor for job seekers.To attract and retain top talent, companies must creatively offer flexible working arrangements. Enter flexible bank holiday policies. With the right HR tech set up, with multiple holiday schemes some of which manage bank holiday leave entitlements flexibly, managing these policies becomes seamless.
- Transparency and Real-Time Information: Employees need visibility into their colleagues’ time off. No more constant communication about who’s on leave—real-time visibility ensures efficient planning. Dynamic booking forms can alert employees if their leave request overlaps with others within the same team.
- Blocked Periods: Many organisations have busy months, such as December, when no one is allowed to take leave. By configuring “Blocked Periods,” no-leave policies can be enforced automatically, so employees can instantly be reminded that leave is not available to book. These can be tailored to specific employees, employee groups, workplaces, time periods, etc.
- Ensuring Sufficient Cover: Some systems can auto-reject overlapping leave requests within set parameters defined by the organisation. This helps to plan for adequate workforce coverage at all times as it eliminates the need for Managers to double-check existing bookings.
- Length of Service Awards: Recognising employee contributions, some employers grant extra leave days based on tenure. HR tech can streamline this administration using Service Entitlement options, which can allocate pro-rated entitlements from service anniversaries or increase the entitlement from the start of the next leave year.
- Managing Holiday Pay Regulations: In this dynamic landscape of work, where irregular hours are increasingly common, managing holiday pay regulations can be a complex task. But fear not! With the right HR tech this can be a straightforward process to automate the calculation of annual leave entitlement for employees with varying work schedules.
- Setting how far in advance people can book time off: It can be important for companies to set parameters on booking annual leave too far in advance to allow maximum flexibility for the business and ensure fairness between colleagues. Configuration of workflows which can enable holiday entitlements to be withheld until the company is ready to release them is possible on some HR systems.
- Automated annual leave accruals: HR tech can handle the trickiest calculations, so HR teams don’t need to. By defining rules and time off policies, the software does the rest, updating employee’s entitlements based on working hours and company rules.
When choosing your HR tech for annual leave management, it’s crucial to consider your specific requirements and see these in action during system demonstrations. Not all systems are equal, and the available functionality does vary significantly among vendors.
Let’s dive into some features that ReThink HR finds particularly valuable:
- Sage People: offers excellent transparency for annual leave calendars through its “Team View” function. Employees can easily see team members’ leave schedules. Additionally, Sage People’s dynamic annual leave booking form alerts employees if their request coincides with another team member’s leave. This means they can consider adjusting their dates or speaking with their manager before submitting the request to try to avoid a rejection.
- Factorial: allows companies to define blocked periods when leave requests are off-limits. System Administrators can manage these restrictions with just a few clicks.
- People XD (Access Group): streamlines annual leave accruals. With pre-defined annual leave entitlements, the system handles calculations automatically. No manual adjustments needed!
Annual leave, and indeed other types of flexible leave, can be admin heavy, so do consider embracing HR tech to see how it can transform annual leave management from chaos into clarity!