Reward insight
We’re all going on a summer holiday
Neil Tonks, of MHR’s legislation team, discusses the way in which a holiday management system can improve administration and simplify matters for employees and managers
I t’s summer once again. Hopefully the weather is good, and many of us are looking forward to a well- earned holiday. In days gone by, whole industries used to close-down for a week or two but these days it’s more common for organisations to operate throughout the year. This means that staffing arrangements must be such that the inevitable holiday absences can be accommodated without affecting performance. It would be ideal if holidays could be spread evenly throughout the year. This would make staffing easier to plan, as the available resource would be constant. In most businesses, however, this ideal cannot be achieved. Most people want a summer holiday or two, and most want time off in the Christmas and new year period or at the times of other religious festivals or events. This makes holiday planning something of a balancing act for managers. Allow too many staff to be away at the same time and your department won’t be able to meet its objectives. Be too rigid on the numbers allowed holidays in the summer and you’ll have demotivated staff who’ll be looking for a job with a more accommodating boss. In order to be able to perform the balancing act, a manager needs to see an overview of the holidays which they’ve approved for their staff. That way, when a new request comes in they can judge the impact it might have on the overall staffing of the department. This takes my mind back to the holiday booking process we used to have. Holiday forms were kept (on paper, in alphabetical order of surname) in a ring binder held
in the human resources (HR) office. An employee wanting a holiday had to go to HR to collect their form, fill it in, take it to their manager for their signature, then return it to its allotted place in the ring binder in the HR office. Not a quick process, especially if your office and the HR office were in different buildings. ...harder to manage, especially if you have varied If a manager wanted to review the approved holidays for their staff, they had to go to the HR office and find all the forms for their reportees, analyse them, then return each to the ring binder. Or, more realistically, they all kept their own list of approved holidays somewhere in their desk and used this to decide whether to approve new requests, hoping that it was accurate and they hadn’t forgotten to update it on a few occasions. This seems stone age now, but it was less than ten years ago. Things are much better now. We have an online system which allows us to book holidays and sends them to our manager for approval, while the managers can see at a glance how many staff already have holidays booked for the same time. Since everyone is looking at views of the same data, there can be no cases where the employee’s holiday forms and their manager’s personal list are out of shift patterns and part-time employees...
sync. This sort of thing is in place at an increasing number of employers, with the paper holiday form being consigned to history. So, is now everything rosy? Well, not always. If you’re a manager with a small number of reportees, or your staffing requirements aren’t complex, you’ll be fine. But imagine you have 75 people reporting to you, or your staffing requirements are complex. There’s a minimum safe level of staffing in a 24/7 operation, perhaps, or you need at least one person with specific skills or qualifications on duty at all times. Then it gets harder to manage, especially if you have varied shift patterns and part-time employees to complicate things. For the complex situations, you need specialist rostering software to assist. If your needs are not that complicated, your HR/payroll system may be able to help. Can managers see working patterns overlaid on the holiday calendar so they get a true picture of who’ll be there? Does it let you set minimum staffing levels and warn the employees when they try to enter a holiday request which would breach the minimum? Or set up views for your employees so when they book a holiday they can see which colleagues have beaten them to it? Both save time and reduce frustration – people are happier if they decide for themselves not to book a holiday because it would leave the workplace short-staffed than if their manager declines a request for the exact same reason. So, if you have managers spending hours working out whether to allow people a holiday, ask if your system can help! n
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Issue 32 | July/August 2017
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
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