Vacation Planner for Employees – Keeping Absences Clearly in View

Manual Calendars – an Outdated Model in the Digital Age

A manually maintained calendar has its charm — but this method is long outdated for the requirements of the modern working world. In practice, there are several reasons for this:

• High susceptibility to errors: If absences are entered manually, employees can easily slip into the wrong row or other errors can creep in. Confusion quickly arises when absences are accidentally entered in the past or otherwise recorded incorrectly.

• Less transparency: Especially in times of remote work / home office, a stationary vacation planner for employees is rather impractical — particularly for those employees who are rarely in the office. Regularly updated photos of the employee vacation plan can be sent via internal channels, but this also creates new effort and potential errors.

• High complexity: If employees use flexible working time models or shift work is part of everyday operations (as in a hospital, for example), HR managers regularly have to juggle staff attendance and absences. Purely manual planning is practically a guarantee that staffing will be over- or under-planned in such work models.

A 2017 study by the management consultancy ROC shows that digital vacation planners are more convenient than manually entering vacation times: two-thirds of the employees surveyed preferred digital options for submitting vacation requests and travel expense reports or registering for training measures.

This and other studies on the implementation of digital vacation planners also make it clear that employees appreciate being more involved in the process themselves, making their own entries via so-called employee self-service tools, and having more control over the procedure. A simple form of implementation is the switch to a digital vacation planner for employees at company level.

How Does a Digital Vacation Planner for Employees Work?

The concept behind a digital vacation plan is very simple — as is its practical use. A corresponding workflow might look like this, for example:

• Employee submits a vacation request: An employee wants to take vacation during a specific period. Using their work laptop or company mobile phone, they access the company’s vacation planning software and enter the desired period there — if necessary, with a comment or a note about a substitute.
• Supervisor receives notification: The employee’s responsible supervisor receives information that one of their employees has requested vacation. The HR manager then checks whether the employee’s absence during the requested period poses a problem or whether certain conditions must be met.
• Approval with one click: After the review, the supervisor approves the vacation with one click — or not, for example if there are scheduling conflicts with other team members. Ideally, supervisors can see overlaps directly in the system. The employee then receives a notification via the digital vacation planner and is therefore informed within a very short time about the status of their further vacation planning.
• Automatic update in the system: Once the vacation has been approved, the employee’s remaining vacation days — based on their vacation entitlement — are updated. This also provides full transparency about how many days the employee can still plan with, without days being “lost” through manual maintenance — vacation accounts and balances remain up to date at all times.

Common features of many digital employee vacation planners generally include the self-service function — in other words, the option for employees to plan and enter their absences independently. The software is also available both web-based in the browser and, increasingly, as a mobile smartphone app.

Modern tools — such as GFOS solutions for digital absence management — are designed for both reliable and intuitive use. After all, what matters when introducing such digital solutions is that not only the IT professionals in the team, but also less tech-savvy colleagues, can use the software effectively.

What Benefits Does a Digital Vacation Planner Offer Employees?

Detailed information about when which employees and specialists are unavailable due to vacation is of central importance for companies. The larger the business and workforce, the less HR managers can afford uncertainty in workforce planning.

Powerful software systems create clarity and give you — and your employees — the full control and transparency in the process that is needed.

Key Features and Functions

With GFOS’s ISO-certified software, your employees’ digital vacation requests are in good hands. Our solutions natively support the following functions:

• Digital approval workflows with multiple stages: Define exactly in the planner who is responsible for which requests. Is an additional approval required, or must a substitute be defined in every case? Design the workflow that suits your company according to clear rules and ensure that vacation requests never “fall through the cracks” again.
• Integration into time-tracking systems: Ideally, a digitized employee vacation planner is directly integrated into the company’s own time-tracking systems. This significantly simplifies absence management — not only is vacation recorded correctly in the system, but managers can also immediately see when employees are available for projects and tasks. Minimum staffing levels or blackout periods depending on department or season can also be defined directly in the software.
• Protection against planning errors: Are important specialists missing in critical work processes? Store employees’ competencies in our skill management tool. In combination with the vacation planner, HR managers can see not only whether several vacations may overlap during period X, but also which competencies are missing in the team as a result. This helps companies avoid suddenly becoming unable to work during critical project phases.
• Self-service portal and mobile app: The era of the time clock is long gone — a modern SaaS time-tracking solution is significantly more convenient and intuitive for employees and HR managers to use. Employees can enter their vacations regardless of time and location and manage them across multiple devices — supervisors immediately see which periods have been requested and approve everything rule-based with a single mouse click.
• Simple reporting & analytics: Using a digital dashboard, supervisors can quickly generate, view, and evaluate reports on sickness rates, unplanned absences, and all planned absences. This gives them an overview of important HR KPIs and enables them to detect, for example, suddenly increasing absences or high workloads much more reliably. Particularly practical: direct connection to payroll accounting via SAP interface.
• Compliance with working time regulations: A digital vacation planner for employees can usefully complement workforce planning in the company. Thanks to convenient absence management via the software, supervisors can be certain that employees also take their vacation entitlements while ensuring, for example, that other colleagues do not exceed maximum working hours — which could otherwise have legal consequences.
• Data-protection-compliant recording: Do you need to prove that a specific employee was present or absent during period X? Thanks to digital recording, this information is only a few mouse clicks away — and at the same time accessible only to authorized persons. Sensitive employee data therefore remains reliably protected and is stored in accordance with the GDPR.

The move away from paper-based processes has long since begun: mobile availability, simple cloud-based workforce planning, or analytics at the touch of a button — all of these are functions that good vacation planner software for medium-sized or larger companies should offer. GFOS software provides all of these features — and is designed for complete IT integration, opening up many additional opportunities for companies.

Efficient Vacation Workforce Planning on a Digital Basis

In short: workforce management software helps present attendance and absences in a simple and clear way. Our HR software acts as an all-rounder that brings together all important information centrally in one place.

By linking time tracking and the vacation planner, every overtime hour, every absence, and every vacation request in the company is also recorded precisely and assigned correctly. This saves planning frustration — both for employees and supervisors.

In addition, the software provides important insights for business development and management: workforce analytics tools use various HR KPIs to make HR processes within the company more transparent and to better identify the needs of the company’s own workforce. In this way, optimization measures can be analyzed and defined more quickly.