From saving time to empowering employees, here’s how HR software can make it easier for you to handle employee holiday requests and time off

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, many organisations have seen a rise in virtual presenteeism among employees – almost half (46%) of Brits carrying out their jobs remotely during lockdown reported feeling more pressure to be ‘present’ for their employer and colleagues, with excess workloads and fear of redundancies driving presenteeism. This pressure resulted in employees working longer hours and taking fewer days off, leading to a large amount of annual leave not being taken.

Today, however, with lockdown and travel restrictions easing, employees are more likely to be using up their annual leave for a much-needed break. For HR teams, this means the volume of holiday requests you have to deal with will be increasing. But, in order to efficiently handle the rising number of holiday and absence requests, you may want to consider turning to HR software – this can give employees the ability to record travel destinations alongside their holiday requests, making it easier for HR to manage Covid cases and safeguard employees.

Along with being able to protect the health of employees, what other benefits can you and your HR team experience when using HR software to manage time off?

1. Save time

By investing in self-service HR software, you can ensure that holiday requests are dealt with quickly and easily and can avoid relying on employees having to send emails or fill in spreadsheets to request time off.

Less manual work by employees also means less errors (eg wrong holiday dates being taken or approved).

2. Empower employees

HR software can not only help you track employee absences (annual leave, sick leave, or staggered start times etc) but can empower employees to view and request holiday, log their own absences and upload supporting documents – meaning less work for your HR team.

With CIPHR HR, for example, employees can easily see who else in the company and in their team is off and view and request their holiday, while HR and managers can view, verify, and report on absence, sickness, and holiday.

By integrating your HR system with rostering and staff management software such as iRota, you can also ensure time off is handled efficiently in organisations and sectors where employees work different hours/shifts or work flexibly (eg healthcare sector).

3. Ensure team capacity

With HR software, managers and employees can see who within their teams is off on holiday, and when they are off.

This, as a result, means that you can foresee team capacity and make other members of the team aware that they may have to juggle more work to make up for fewer employees working, if needed.

For employees who want to request holiday, they can use HR software to see if anyone else within their team is off at the same time. If yes, they can take action to request holiday during different days to make sure there is enough team capacity to ensure jobs are done – this means holidays won’t always be taken at the same time by employees in the same team, and managers won’t have to decline holiday requests.

4. Inform your people strategy

HR software also allows you to drive HR strategy by taking a look at the trends on your absence data, enabling you to identify areas that require improvement.

As some employees around the world plan a holiday abroad, and others stay local, HR teams need to ensure they have the correct processes in place to make holiday management run smooth