Although holiday forms help to standardise the process of requesting holidays, which is far better than receiving numerous emails and texts, or having post-it notes stuck everywhere – they definitely won’t solve all your problems.

In this blog, we’ll look at some of the issues associated with using holiday forms and how you can make the process hassle-free.

Inefficient

Using holiday forms creates extra admin for everyone involved.

Holiday requests, whether written by hand on paper forms or emailed across, run the risk of being overlooked or misplaced.

If employees can’t easily locate the holiday form, they may still end up resorting to jotting it down on a post-it note, making holiday requests impossible to manage efficiently.

Time consuming

Every time a holiday request is made, staff will need to manually check for calendar clashes to find out if someone else has already booked the time off.

Once they’ve tracked down the information, approved requests will need to be added to a shared calendar or wall planner, and a spreadsheet will have to be maintained to monitor outstanding holiday, so no one goes over their annual allowance.

Staffing issues

The holiday form request system is prone to human error. It’s easy to forget to update wall planners and spreadsheets, and approve holiday without spotting a date clash, resulting in staffing issues.

Hard to monitor

Many businesses decide that approving holiday requests on a first-come-first-served basis is the fairest way to allocate holiday.

If holiday forms are put on your desk, they can easily become lost in other paperwork, making it very hard to know how long it has been there, in order to allocate holiday fairly.

Inconvenient

As we’ve seen, using holiday forms is a time-consuming process, having to update your records, calendars and spreadsheets to track leave.

But it’s also a very repetitive process. If you have to decline holiday, the whole process has to be repeated again!

What can be done?

Switching to using an absence management system, such as LeavePlanner, means you can easily approve and track outstanding holiday entitlement, without the need for wall charts or spreadsheets. It’s simple to avoid conflicting holiday requests, with a fast approve or decline process.

LeavePlanner can set a maximum absent staff level for a department or group, as well as restrict leave over key dates, to maintain the correct staffing levels.

For a free trial, call Steve on 01252 636 070 or email support@leaveplanner.com.