You might have been in the hospitality industry for a decade, but leave management is stressful for even the experienced manager.
When you’re manually tracking your team’s leave balances and requests, things slip through the cracks. Add that to the stress and time it’s costing you, and you’re setting yourself up for failure.
But there’s never been a better time to improve how you manage your team’s leave. Read on for tips to make leave management a breeze.
Streamline time-off requests
Whether you manage a small, independent pub or a chain of coffee shops, you’re used to managing time-off requests. But you're wasting time and money if you’re still using sticky notes, multiple text threads, or spreadsheets to collect those requests.
In fact, absences cause significant productivity losses for each day the employee is away.
Next time your staff asks for leave for a holiday, surgery, or wedding, use your workforce management solution’s leave management system to streamline those requests.
Empower your team to manage their leave. Your team must have clarity over their entitled leave types and current balances. Using a digital leave management solution to track balances can help provide transparency between employees and managers.
Cut out the middleman. By using a leave management system that can push leave timesheet details straight into your payroll provider, you can be confident that all your leave balances are being paid out correctly (not to mention saving loads of time by automating this manual data entry).
Simplify compliance
In the United Kingdom, all employees are entitled to annual leave. Your managers must know how this applies to their team. Rough manual calculations will no longer be good enough. Instead, businesses must switch to automated methods for managing entitlement numbers to remain compliant.
Further, the Good Work Plan has been adopted as UK Government policy. This plan proposes that anyone who works with your company for 26 weeks will be able to request a fixed working pattern. So an employee with varied shift patterns would turn into a scheduled staff member.
As a result of this, holiday pay has now changed to a 52-week reference period to eliminate seasonal variations and increase the worker’s flexibility when choosing when to take their holiday. It complicates matters for the manager, but dynamic and easy-to-find timesheets and payslips will simplify the scenario.
What to simplify your compliance?
Make your scheduling and leave management as transparent as possible. Quickly view and approve leave requests from your workforce management dashboard. Keep track of booked time off to avoid conflicting holidays. And manage your team’s different leave entitlements and balances.
Choose a tool that has compliance safeguards built-in. Ensure all scheduling and timesheet details are captured and stored automatically, providing an ongoing record to address inquiries from regulators and employees.
Integrate your payroll. Make sure your systems directly integrate with your payroll tools so there’s no question about time off or payment. After Boxpark integrated its leave management system with payroll, accuracy increased. “There’s no dispute whether staff are getting paid incorrectly,” says Chris Byrne, general manager. “It helps keep everything transparent.”
Be a (better) leader with better leave management
Managing leave can hassle business owners, managers, and HR departments. But the right workforce management solution can help.
When you create employee rotas with Deputy, you’ll never accidentally schedule people who are on leave. And when someone is away, find a replacement to cover their shift with the push of a button.
Read about Deputy’s leave management software to understand how it can help with managing holiday entitlements and more. Or jump into the modern workforce when you sign up for a free trial of Deputy.
