All employees need time off to recharge their batteries and return to work refreshed and ready for their next challenge.
Managing vacations is a struggle, even in small businesses, so it’s a good idea to think about how to handle this in-depth. Here are some tactics and tools to help you out, and ensure that your workforce is happy and productive.
Understanding the challenges involved
The first point to make about vacation tracking today is that there are new obstacles for managers to overcome which have only arrived relatively recently.
The most significant of these is the rise of remote working , which means that team members aren’t all sharing the same office space, and moreover might not be in the same time zone as one another.
With WFH culture coming to the foreground, it’s more important than ever to stay on top of allocating and organizing vacation days.
Appreciating the benefits
Another aspect to understand is that using technology to improve productivity is not just about ensuring that employees have the resources they need to fulfill their responsibilities from moment to moment, but also helping them step back and unwind, rather than always being in work mode.
Taking vacation improves mental health , just as working every hour of the day without a break can lead to burnout. With a proactive, technologically-enhanced approach to vacation tracking, you can boost morale without hurting your bottom line.
Choosing the right software
There are software solutions to accelerate and automate all aspects of business, from handling payroll to coordinating customer services.
As you’d expect, dedicated vacation tracking solutions are available, and can work wonders in terms of keeping you on top of this.
Knowing what to look for in a vacation tracker is helpful when narrowing down your options. You could just use a standard spreadsheet, of course, but this is usually unwieldy and not easy to integrate with other services.
Modern solutions will not only let you review and approve or decline vacation requests from employees but also embrace cross-compatibility with other platforms so that calendar alerts are sent out and everyone is on the same page.
Embracing positive policies
Bear in mind that vacation tracking is just part of the process of stewarding your workforce in a responsible and productive way. A tool like this also needs a good set of policies behind it to be at its best.
For example, you need to ensure that team members not only know how many vacation days they have available in a given year but also what expectations and responsibilities apply in terms of when they can take them. You don’t want time off to clash with important events, because this will only lead to you having to deny requests, which can feel draconian.
In addition, a vacation tracker can be a great indicator of who is failing to take their allocated vacation days. It’s worth encouraging and even incentivizing time off, because the aforementioned likelihood of burnout isn’t just bad for the individual in question, but also bad for the business as a whole.
The bottom line of vacation tracking
Making the most of vacation tracking will mean that this is not actually a task you need to dedicate much brain space to on a regular basis.
There may be teething problems to fix in the early stages of adoption, but it is better to make the switch and use a tool to empower you, rather than sticking to whatever approach you’re using at the moment. The sooner you change things up, the sooner the benefits will flood in.
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