Essential features to look for in a Vacation Tracker
1. Leave requests and tracking
Leave requests are one of the essential features of any vacation tracker. Employees should be able to manage their holidays and submit time-off requests. Similarly, managers should be able to look at their team’s calendar and approve or reject time-off requests. This saves a lot of time, back and forth emails, and reduces human error.
2. Team calendars
Team calendars are a great way to track who’s available and who’s not available at any given point. Employees can plan their respective work and manage dependencies. Managers also benefit from a unified calendar view to figure out the team’s availability and productivity trends. Hence, a team calendar is a must-have feature in a vacation tracker.
3. Multiple time-off policies
An organization can have numerous departments, shifts, geographical locations, etc. The vacation policy of each of the above may differ. There’s no one size fits all policy. Hence, your vacation tracker should have the ability to create multiple time-off policies and map employees under them.
4. Multiple holiday calendars and workweeks
Your employees in the United States will not follow the same holiday calendar as your employees in Europe or India. Your employees in the Middle East follow a Sunday to Thursday work week while the American and European employees follow a Monday to Friday work schedule. Hence, your vacation tracker should be able to accommodate multiple holiday calendars, workweeks and map them to their respective time-off policies.
5. Automatic accruals
Let’s face it. Calculating accruals manually is an uphill task and, quite frankly, an unwanted one. A good vacation tracker should handle several accrual types and calculate paid time-off accruals automatically, thus saving the HR personnel a lot of time and effort. You should also be able to define carryover rules and automate the entire process.
6. Integrations
Integrations are a vital component of any vacation tracker. An effective vacation tracker should integrate with many core HR solutions, employee database solutions, and payroll solutions. Time-offs and compensation are closely related. That’s why payroll integration becomes crucial.
7. Reports and insights
A high-quality vacation tracker comes with inbuilt reports on employee absence to help you understand your employees better. For example, sometimes, you may find that your employees are under-utilizing their vacation leave. In such cases, you may have to encourage and incentivize your employees to take time-offs to avoid burnout. You can also identify patterns on when employees are prone to take time-offs.