So you’ve got a team that doesn’t sit in the same room, the same building or even the same town (or country!). How does Tom, the office-based web designer know if Ted, the programmer who occasionally works from home, is at work, on holiday, off ill or on a training course? How about the rest of his team that also works flexibly? James calls in sick. How much time does Team Manager Sarah need to record James’ absence, and ensure that everyone knows where everyone else is?
If you’re using the correct tools, hardly any time! If you’re not using the correct tools, quite a lot of admin is involved!
The above scenario is becoming more and more common in this day and age, and flexible working is making it a more time-consuming task to manage even small teams. Add up the time spent on managing this and it takes a decent slice out of your managers’ typical day. Considering they’re paid more, it’s hardly a good use of their time!
There are a few common approaches to tackle this calamity. One of the crudest is sending out dozens of e-mails about everyone’s whereabouts which each team member needs to read and remember. The next stage would probably be sharing calendars in your calendar application. But in its most basic form, this means having to open each person’s calendar to check their whereabouts. Then there is the option of a group calendar. The problem of course is that it still requires a fair amount of maintenance.
A more sensible approach is to have an integrated solution. A solution where, as soon as someone books vacation, it automatically appears in the group calendar. When James calls in sick, the manager marks him as absent and that too shows immediately in the group calendar. Of course, it would also be great if the same system kept track of everyone’s usage of their holiday allowance, number of sick days and so on for the HR administrator to report on. And wouldn’t it be great if those bookings appeared in Outlook too?
You can quite clearly see the benefits of an integrated approach for managing your workforce. Even if they’re not mobile, just being able to open a single calendar that doesn’t take forever to maintain, is a significant time saving and something that lets everyone get on with what they’re doing.
There are a number of leave booking/management solutions on the market. Some of them focus purely on leave (holiday, sick, maternity, etc.) while others help with knowing everyone’s whereabouts. When looking for a leave management system, look for one that has the following attributes:
- It should allow you to choose which leave types you need and add more for whatever you want to keep track of. Not only vacation and sick, but also “working from home” or “working from site A”, “Training” and so on.
- Is able to deal with your companies’ allowance rules (maybe you give each employee a number of personal days from which all their sick days and vacation come. Maybe you just have an allowance for leave days).
- It should allow employees to belong to groups (and view groups’ whereabouts) that don’t necessarily align with the organisational structure, but allow for cross-functional project teams. This lets an employee know the whereabouts of all those who are relevant to him but may not be in his team.
- It should have the reports that tell you what you want to know.
So bear these criteria in mind when evaluating the various leave booking and tracking systems on the market. Without question, a leave tracking system saves heaps of admin time and reduces the risk of human errors in calculating how many days someone has left.
