Managing Staff Leave and Vacation HR Requests

Wonder How Employees Can Request Vacation or Sick Leave?

For any company that is growing their team, managing an employee calendar gets overwhelming.

For years we would use Google calendar for the schedule with a Google form for team members to request time off. The Google form would email the HR manager and hopefully he/she would notice it and process it and post in the calendar.

Oftentimes, the team member would send management a Slack message later to follow up –

Did we receive their leave request form submission?

Is it approved?

When will HR and management review this leave request?

Are others also requesting time off on the same day?

Can I plan my vacation now, or should I wait?

The list of questions and concerns from staff goes on and on.

Prefer to watch instead of read? Check out our free video tutorial below:

These questions and problems happen because a company’s team grows and no IT systems were put in place for HR management.

At the beginning of a company’s life cycle, sure it is a small and close knit group of staff and partners. Often sitting in the same room, shouting out that they want to take the next week off and get a confirmation from the others in a few minutes, boom – HR management done!

But as you grow, and especially as you grow an online team – keeping track of leave requests for holidays, vacations, and other reasons get out of hand.

So now that we have identified the pain point (emails / slack / google forms filling our HR manager’s inbox) – let’s talk about the solution.

Creating an HR management “portal” puts all of this information in one place.

In order for the staff to create a leave request, you first need to have management, or human resources (if you’re big enough to have a dedicated HR manager), will need to define what kinds of leaves the company has.

Examples of these are normally:

Sick leave – if someone isn’t feeling well and not able to come into work. Sure, we can’t expect someone to come into the office when they are sick – but we still need to have them login to this HR management software and file sick leave. This way we track all the sick days this employee has filed. Not only track, but also for transparency, everyone will be aware this person is off on sick leave that day.

Vacation leave – we all should get some time off, right! Full time employees are granted certain vacation days, and how do we track the amount of these days and which days they have selected? A common request from staff who don’t have a proper HR management system at their company complain they don’t know how to file leave.

Personal day – maybe your company doesn’t want to pay for time off, or wants to allow the staff to take a personal, unpaid day. This is what we would define a personal day.

Training day – successful companies invest a lot in training their staff. By having a dedicated intensive training day(s) your team can move faster and grow better. But oftentimes other people in the company don’t know that person is in training, but using an HR management software – now it is clearly marked and transparent.

So how does the actually process work?

The employee logs into their Regarding Work HR management system and goes to LEAVES – APPLY LEAVE.

Once in the apply leave screen, you can choose:

Single Leave Dates – for a single day off.
Multiple Leave Dates – if you are looking to do a string of days off.
Half day is also possible – if you need to take time off for your children’s rehearsal or a doctor’s appointment for example.

Once you decide if you are filing a single or multiple – you then choose the date(s) and then from the drop down pick the type of leave it is (holiday, sick day). The type is determined by the HR management, if you do not see one that you believe should be there, you need to request from HR to have it added – as you as the employee cannot add leave types. Once you have picked the type, you can also fill out a reason. This will help management understand what the leave is for and reduce the back and forth.

Once you click submit – you will see the pending request.

You can go to LEAVES —> MY LEAVES and see it in the pending status, as well as any other previous leaves or pending requests.

Now it will alert management.

An email notification will go to the HR admin of the system (company) and they will be able to login to their HR management account and process this.

As an HR admin, you will go to ATTENDANCE —> LEAVE APPLICATIONS.

In this screen you will see the list of all leave requests – from approved to rejected to pending.

You can view the details of all leave requests, but for today’s tutorial we will discuss viewing the pending leave form request.

Going into the details, you can see the same details that the contractor put in. The dates, the type, and the reason / explanation.

Hopefully you are happy with their performance and ready to approve it. Clicking approve will send them an email notification allowing them to take those days.

And now that stressful process that was done manually is streamlined into an online HR management system process.

When new employees ask about how to take a day off, simple – they have their new Regarding Work online system and can process it.

We hope you see the value in making HR fun again! Keeping a happy team with full transparency is a great way to ensure you company is healthy and growing.

Try out the Regarding Work online HR management system – for free – today!

And leverage HR to build your company’s success.

Create an Account, Free, on Regarding Work HR