First published on Monday, November 18, 2024
Last updated on Tuesday, December 3, 2024
Your employees are entitled to time away from work, and as an employer, it’s your responsibility to ensure the tracking process is managed effectively in your business.
Leave management covers a range of different types of time off work, from holidays to sick leave and job protected absences. This is an area of managing a business that can quickly become an administration nightmare, if not done well.
From making sure everyone is taking enough time off work, knowing which employees are currently at work, to accepting last minute holiday requests, and avoiding clashes in the calendar. For small businesses with limited time or resources to manage this process, a simple spreadsheet just won’t cut it!
The challenges of managing employee leave
More businesses are choosing to automate their employee leave management as manually handling leave requests and employee absences can cause several issues. Such as, clashing schedules, poor record keeping, a lack of communication between colleagues and managers, and the risk of payroll errors.
Staying on top of leave requests and the overlapping of vacation days can be hard, in addition to providing employees with a simple way to request time off. Add managing absences and sick leave into the mix and it can become incredibly difficult to keep track of where your employees are and when.
Time away from work is important for employee wellbeing and work life balance. So being sure that your team has the option to request vacation time when they need or want is important both for them and your business.
This is why centralised leave management software solutions have become a popular option for managing and overseeing paid time off, holidays, employee absence, and other types of leave in a single view.
Features of leave management software
Leave management software makes things like holiday tracking and employee leave management more efficient for businesses by automating the entire process. By placing everything into one, easy-to-manage, online calendar/planner, you'll always have a full view of who’s in, who’s on vacation and who’s due for some much-needed time off.
You can do everything from accepting or denying vacation requests, automatically calculating vacation allowance, to removing the risk of leave conflicts, and saving yourself so much time in administration tasks.
With easy-to-use features like these, it’s no surprise that the leave management software market is on the rise! With more and more clever features being developed to offer employers and employees, this style of HR software is only expected to get better as technology advances.
Key features of a stellar leave management software include:
Accurate documentation of employee leave and absences
Time off tracking
Holiday request workflows
Enforcement of vacation policies
Reporting and analytics
Calendar integration
User-friendly interface
Staff login access
Instant notifications
The benefits of digitalised leave management
Both your business and employees greatly benefit from the extensive features of an efficient leave management software as they help to simplify, organise and properly manage your leave request and acceptance processes with ease.
Automate holiday time tracking
Approve or deny time-off requests in one click
Enjoy a single view of your entire team’s time off
Remove conflict with annual leave clash alerts
Streamline HR processes
Enhance employee wellbeing and workplace culture
With a central system, the holiday request workflow makes it easy to request, review, approve or deny paid time off in just a few clicks. A straightforward solution, allowing you to throw out your outdated employee leave management spreadsheets.
Staying legally compliant
While it’s not mandatory for UK employers to have a leave of absence policy, it’s best practice to have one. A leave of absence policy ensures your business has guidelines and procedures in place for when employees want to request time off work. It should align with current employment laws. Providing employees with information such as:
Annual leave entitlements
How to request time off
Holiday and sick pay rules
Absence reporting guidelines
Processes for requesting job protected leaves
Make sure employees have access to and can frequently review this policy. By using a software solution for your leave management and absence tracking, you can keep your leave management process in line with your absence policies and minimise confusion in the workplace.
BrightBase includes a range of templates and HR documents, so you don't have to stress about writing your absence policy from scratch.
Other strategies for effective leave management
In addition to automating your leave and absence processes, you should communicate clearly with your employees and encourage employee wellness and time off from work to create a positive workplace.
Thanks to leave management software, you can promote a self-serve approach, urging your employees to book their annual leave allowance ahead of time and plan for breaks throughout the year. And with the BrightHR app, your employees can book annual leave from anywhere in just a few clicks. While you can approve or deny requests no matter where you are!
Not only does this make your administration processes simpler, but supports the prevention of burnout in the workplace.
Manage leave with BrightHR
With BrightHR’s suite of time saving HR tools and leave management software you can manage employee leave with ease!
Both our staff vacation planner and online absence management tool provide a total overview of who has time off. Whether this is for paid time off, sick leave or other job protected absences, you’ll aways have clear visibility of your employee leave. From automatically calculating annual leave allowances, to flagging time off clashes, leave management is a breeze with BrightHR.
Book a demo to automate and streamline your processes today.
