staff holiday planner

Having a staff holiday planner is an important part of workforce management. Coordinating employee holidays across teams and departments can be a tricky process and can often leave your business under resourced at key times.

Traditional paper based staff leave and holiday planner processes are prone to errors and confusion and are costly and time consuming. Streamlining your holiday planner processes across your business will enable you to take control of staff holidays and make life easier for all involved.

The e-days holiday planner will consolidate staff holiday planning and monitoring into one simple process. e-days empowers staff to request their own holiday online, the request is then sent for approval by a manager who can reject or authorise the holiday request with a simple click. e-days provides a clear and accurate process for recording staff holiday in addition to reducing the workload on management.

An integrated holiday planner calendar will show staff when colleagues are in or out of the office and when they have holiday booked. This enables staff to make more informed decisions on when to take holiday and improve their chances of having holiday approved by a manager. Managers and HR can use the calendar to identify clashes, shortages and potential issues with upcoming staff holidays and absence.

Holiday entitlements are automatically calculated and updated when holidays are taken by staff. e-days gives staff, managers and HR an at a glance view of information regarding holiday entitlements, days taken, days left and other information regarding staff leave and absence.

The flexibility of e-days allows for company processes such as carry over, training days, weekend working, bank holidays and part time workers to be customised to your ways of working. Staff holidays can also be calculated in hours as well as days.

This organisation, one of the world’s most well known entertainment companies, had previously managed holiday planning and sickness reporting using a system which had been developed in-house. However, when the system broke down and the key developers of the system had already left the business they were stuck without a method to manage their 500+ employee’s holiday and absence requests.

Spread across various offices and with different processes and workflows this organisation required a system which:

a. Would fit into their established ways of working

The flexibility of the e-days holiday planner meant that their existing workflows, management processes and email based systems could be easily transferred to e-days. e-days’ experts worked with this organisation to understand their processes and either transfer or improve them into e-days.

Implementing e-days within this organisation was about fitting the e-days holiday planner into their organisation and not vice versa.

b. Could be deployed in a matter of weeks

As the e-days holiday planner is online the full process of demonstration, data collection, deployment, launch and then support can be done entirely remotely. This means that sales people and engineers waste less time travelling between sites and any issues and changes can be addressed immediately.

Deploying e-days with this client was also made easier by the fact that there is no installation required at all. This speeded the process up as there need be no consultation with internal IT for security and specification processes.

These factors ensured that e-days was deployed, and launched, within a matter of weeks.

c. Is easy & intuitive to use without extensive training

The speed of deployment is irrelevant if the end-user has to spend hours learning how to use the system. e-days is so easy and intuitive to use that this organisation required no end-user training at all. Simple presentations and an onscreen help section were enough to enable 500+ employees to use the system without overloading their IT and HR departments with support calls.

d. Is cost effective enough to implement without the requirement to create a tender process.

Due to time and resource constraints this organisation required a system which could be purchased within their contingency budget and which did not require additional allocation of spend. e-days is licensed on a scale, dependent on the amount of users on the system, and comes in at just a few £’s per user. This license basis allowed this organisation to get started on e-days without huge initial outlay on the purchase of a system and with low annual costs they would be able to re-visit their decision annually.

Furthermore, there were no travel expenses or hardware costs which are often associated with installed software and company-wide systems. The costs of e-days were upfront and straightforward. In addition to this the lack of any required external or internal training further minimised the cost and resource overhead usually associated with deploying systems of this kind.

This organisation was able to deploy the e-days holiday planner without recourse to extra budgeting and the speed of implementation meant that each £ spent on e-days was being put to work across the entire organisation almost immediately.