Accurate leave planning is a key ingredient to successful absence management. It plays a vital role in promoting employee well-being and job satisfaction. This way, it has a massive positive impact on team productivity and overall business performance.
A good leave planner is one of the core things you need to have in order to gain these valuable benefits for your own company. And actiPLANS is an excellent example of such a tool.
Here, we’re going to explore how actiPLANS can help you improve each and every aspect of absence management. Yet first, let’s see what a leave planner is and what makes it so vital.
What Is a Leave Planner? 📅
Leave planner is just another name for an absence scheduling tool – it allows employees to line up their vacations in a team calendar and helps managers to track everyone’s days off and paid time off (PTO) balances in a convenient way.
Leave planners vary in shape and form.
Small teams with tighter budgets can easily manage their leave time via simple handmade spreadsheet tools. As for larger organizations, they have a multitude of professionally built online leave planners to select from: starting with fairly cheap and straightforward manual time off trackers and ending with more exquisite automated solutions that contain a panoply of all-around features.
actiPLANS is the golden middle between these two extremes. It’s an intuitive online leave planner that you can buy at an affordable price. However, besides a simple visual timeline for leave scheduling, it includes some valuable reports and robust automation that boost work efficiency and enhance decision-making.
actiPLANS makes leave planning as effective and enjoyable as can be. But before we discuss how it does that, let’s briefly see which benefits you can gain using a good leave planner in your team.
Why Should You Even Use an Online Leave Planner? 👀
- Safe and error-free data management – Online software ensures high data security and makes it much harder for you to lose vital business information thanks to cloud storage and regular backups. Besides, the best leave planners include powerful data management controls and built-in automation, which reduce the risk of data errors to a large degree.
- Higher efficiency – By streamlining PTO accrual, time off request approval, and similar absence management processes, online leave planners help you to save hours. And you can use this freed up time to focus on more important (and profitable) tasks and stop getting yourself distracted by the routine ones.
- Enhanced project estimation – Historical time off data is of immense assistance in project estimation. Knowing how much leave time your team members used in the past, you can predict how frequently they may be absent in the future. This allows you to set more realistic timeframes for your projects and avoid significant schedule delays.
Easy Leave Planning with actiPLANS ✨
actiPLANS has five handy features that make leave planning as easy as pie. Here’s what they are:
1. Error-free PTO accrual
Accurate PTO balance data plays a vital role in leave planning. It dictates how much time off an employee can take at any particular point throughout their employment period and helps to ensure they don’t overuse it.
That’s why actiPLANS has a flexible functionality for streamlined PTO management. It allows you to accrue employees’ PTO balances in line with your unique time off rules, do that as efficiently and accurately as possible and avoid manual calculations.
Besides, with actiPLANS, your team members have free access to their PTO balance data and can refer to it whenever planning their days off. In other words, actiPLANS makes PTO tracking convenient for managers and their teams alike.
For more information on how to set it up, be sure to check out this post.
2. Custom leave types
Understanding the reasons why employees go absent can be very useful – you can apply this knowledge for more accurate project estimation, absenteeism prevention, and whatnot.
Hence, actiPLANS lets you create as many unique leave types as you want – use them to get a deeper insight into the causes of absence in your team.
3. Effortless vacation scheduling
actiPLANS supports a visual approach to leave scheduling.
Your team members can submit leave requests in just a few clicks using a beautiful and easy-to-navigate timeline. It depicts all the necessary info on one’s available PTO balance, as well as past and future leave requests, which simplifies the leave planning process a great deal and makes it more enjoyable for employees.
Besides, actiPLANS users can easily check on their colleagues’ scheduled vacations either via the web version of the tool or the mobile app. This way, it becomes easier to avoid overlaps when planning vacations, prevent staff shortages and maintain an optimal level of team productivity at all times.
4. Automated leave request approval
A sluggish and burdensome process of leave request approval largely complicates time off planning for employees. This is particularly true if overlapping vacations are a big no-no in your organization – the longer it takes to approve one person’s leave request, the harder it becomes for other team members to arrange their own plans and coordinate them with you.
Automated leave request approval comes in handy in this regard.
In actiPLANS, you can set automatic time off approval for all or just specific leave types. Plus, you can review and approve employees’ leave requests in bulk. And in case some employees enjoy your complete trust, you can switch off all the time off controls for them whatsoever and all their leave requests will be approved automatically too.
5. Informative time off reports
Detailed time off data is the key to better leave management. It shows you why employees go absent, helps to see whether you have a problem with absenteeism, and makes it easier to address this problem early on.
actiPLANS contains a bunch of insightful time off reports that let you analyze your team’s absence data in proper depth:
- Run the Leave Time & PTO Balances Report to review organization-wide time off statistics and compare the data for different employees.
- Open the Past Leaves Calendar to get a comprehensive breakdown of each team member’s time off history.
- Review the Balance History Report to track how employees’ time off was accrued and used over any period of time.
Flexible time off management settings, automation, visual scheduling tools, and informative reports – these essential features make actiPLANS a perfect online leave planner for any team. Sign up for a free 30-day trial to make sure of it yourself!
Improving Business Results with a Leave Planner: 5 Practical Tips ✅
A staff leave planner is a valuable tool for any business owner. Besides letting you track employees’ time off in an effortless and accurate way, it can provide you with a wealth of information on how to enhance team productivity and attain better business results.
Here are a few things you can do with its help:
1. Calculate the absenteeism rate
The absenteeism rate is a measure of how often employees are absent from work, and there are several reasons why calculating it is vital for businesses:
- Staff absenteeism can have a significant impact on productivity. When employees are absent, work doesn’t get done, and this can lead to lost revenue for businesses.
- Absenteeism can also lead to increased costs, as businesses may need to pay for temporary workers to cover for absent employees.
- Absenteeism can create morale problems within a workplace, as other employees may have to pick up the slack and may resent those who are regularly absent.
By measuring the absenteeism rate in your team regularly, you will address these problems and prevent them from taking place, and a leave planning tool can provide you with all the data you need to fulfill this task:
- Run a report to see how much time off an employee took over a certain period of time.
- Then, divide the number of days that the employee was absent by the total number of working days during the selected period. For example, if an employee was absent for two days out of a total of ten working days, their absenteeism rate would be 20%.
Generally speaking, an absenteeism rate of less than 3% is considered good, while a rate of more than 10% is considered high. However, to understand if absenteeism becomes a problem in your team, you will need to take into account a variety of different factors: the type of your business, its size, the country where it’s located, individual reasons why employees go absent, etc.
2. Identify employee leave patterns
Once you know your company’s absenteeism rate, you can start to look for patterns in employee leave:
- Is there a certain time of year when absences tend to spike?
- Or is there a particular type of leave that’s more common than others?
Identifying these patterns can help you take steps to enhance your attendance / absence policies, as well as overall performance results. For example, if you notice that absences tend to spike around the holidays, you may want to consider offering employees additional paid time off during that period.
3. Plan workloads and schedules
One of the most frustrating things about employee leave is trying to figure out who will cover for the person who is out. An online leave planner can help with this by showing you who is available to work when someone is out on leave. This can make it much easier to schedule resources and avoid last-minute scrambling.
4. Communicate with your team
Another great use for an online staff leave planner is communicating with employees about their upcoming leave.
For instance, tools like actiPLANS allow managers and employees to share comments regarding leave requests, let you see when colleagues go on vacation, and automatically notify users about their day off approval statuses. Such handy features help to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that there are no surprises when someone is out on leave.
5. Create a more effective PTO policy
By tracking employee absences, you can get a better understanding of how your current PTO policy is being used (or not used). This information can be invaluable in making changes to your time off management procedures and rules in a way that will better meet the needs of your business and employees.
Conclusion 🏁
A leave planner is an extremely valuable asset for businesses of all sizes. It helps to plan and better utilize the resources available, which minimizes the negative impacts of employee absences on your business.
Looking for a high-quality leave planner? Consider actiPLANS! It lets you keep track of different types of leave and automates the absence management process, saving you a ton of time. Besides, actiPLANS is truly easy to use – just enter the dates of your upcoming vacation, and actiPLANS will do the rest.
Give it a try today!
