Collaboration is one of the key building blocks that contribute to the company’s success. When your project managers and employees can’t coordinate their workload inside the team, your company loses a great deal of revenue. That is why management books and project management software established a new trend in business software and literature.
Team calendars are one of the oldest but still reliable management tools that originated from paper office calendars and became online apps with multi-platform access. Moreover, modern team calendars offer additional project management features that streamline teamwork and collaboration. In this article, we would like to shed light on team calendars with absence management support – a feature that most team calendars don’t provide and that companies often forget about when looking for a calendar solution.
Benefits of Team Calendars
A decade ago, most of us used to have calendar boards in their offices with pins and sticky notes. Today we have dozens of online calendar tools that offer many more benefits than old-school physical boards. So, what are they?
Streamlined Leave Requests
- Employees can easily request time away from the office, be it a home office day, sick leave, vacation, business trip.
- Set up custom leave types and work statuses. For example, most companies offer their employees to choose between the office and remote work during the pandemic – ask your employees to change their status when they work from home so that you and your team could quickly understand if your teammate is available for face-to-face or remote collaboration.
- Remote employees can request a leave of absence online, without visiting the office, contacting their manager or HR team.
Leave management in actiPLANS – create an unlimited number of leave types, get your team to request and plan their time off and review employee availability
- Employees can view the status of their leave requests without disrupting their manager.
- Managers get instantly notified about new leave requests and can approve or reject them in a few clicks.
- Employees and managers have access to the vacation schedules of their fellow team members and can plan their vacations accordingly.
Next-Level Project Management
- As a project manager, you can use the absence schedules of your team members to plan the workload accordingly.
Work scheduling in actiPLANS – create custom work types, assign them across your team taking their time off into account and review project activities on a timeline
- See who is going to be present in the office and who is working remotely today to plan your daily meetings.
- Take into account the future employee absences to avoid bottlenecks.
- Manage overlapping absence requests in a way that respects the interests of employees and maintains an optimal balance of available human resources.
- Managers can use attendance data to identify absenteeism and burnout cases.
Upgraded Team Collaboration
- Employees can see if their peers are available.
- Employees get notified of their peers’ absences and tardiness.
Improved Employee Attendance & Morale
- Employees know there is a reliable attendance tracking system in place, which boosts responsibility and improves attendance.
- Employees experience less stress and hassle when asking for time off.
- Add company holidays to team calendars to improve attendance and morale.
Transparent Employee Benefits
- Employees can review their PTO balance.
- Employees see the current Sick Leave balance.
- Attendance tracking ensures employees get paid in full and on time.
How to Improve Productivity with Your Team Calendar?
When used properly, team calendars have a powerful positive impact on project management processes, collaboration, attendance, and even employee job satisfaction. Read on to learn how you can get all these benefits using a team calendar like actiPLANS – a team attendance calendar available for browsers and smartphones.
Streamline Leave Request Management
It may sound surprising, but many of our clients used to manage absences via paper applications, emails or Excel spreadsheets before they switched to actiPLANS. With this online team calendar, employees can request absences in a few clicks.
After the request has been submitted, the user in charge of approving requests will receive an email notification and will be able to approve, modify or reject it.
More than that, you no longer need to manually calculate paid time off and sick days balances. In actiPLANS, you can define any accrual rules that comply with any leave time policy.
Bring Project Management to the Next Level
Team calendars are first of all corporate schedules that you can use to plan and distribute the workload across your team more efficiently. You and your team members can view which employees are available today, who is at the office and who is working remotely, review the upcoming leaves of the team members and plan work and absences accordingly.
Absence schedule in actiPLANS displaying various leave types with different color codes
Improve Employee Attendance & Morale
Team calendars as any other business tool usually provide reports and analytics features. Use them to review absence time grouped by leave types, time range and employees. HR teams and project managers can use this data to identify absenteeism issues, burnout and work overload cases.
Ready to Implement an Employee Attendance Calendar?
Team calendars offer dozens of benefits that include improved productivity, boosted morale and streamlined leave request process. More than that, corporate calendars allow you to manage remote and even scattered teams and be sure that they stick to the schedule and play fair. To support middle-sized and remote teams, we created actiPLANS – a team calendar that is tailored for absence management needs.
To make sure that you make the most of your resources, you may want to consider actiPLANS + actiTIME integration and manage time and leaves in a single environment that shares the same user accounts, data and settings
