In many organisations, the process for making and reviewing staff leave requests remains hopelessly old-fashioned. It’s heavily paper-based and – in turn – time-consuming, difficult to manage and environmentally unfriendly.

At Dataplan, we take a different approach. We believe that the making of leave requests should be as straightforward as possible for staff members – and that approvers should have the tools necessarily to make efficient decisions on the outcomes of these requests.

That’s why we’ve invested in Timetastic. 

A new approach to managing staff leave requests

Timetastic is an innovative employee leave management system that enables time-off requests to be submitted at the click of a button. It then allows these requests to be swiftly considered on a departmental basis, with approvers automatically notified of any leave request clashes within the given department.

The functionality is such that employees are able to send a reminder to their manager, if they are concerned that their leave request has been overlooked. In addition – the system permits time off to be booked on behalf of team members by management, e.g. if the employee has phoned in sick.

All of this combines to make an efficient leave management system that keeps hassle to a minimum. 

Going beyond holiday requests

We have taken our use of Timetastic further than many organisations. By using its application programming interface (api) – we have linked Timetastic to our door access and staff page that shows us who is in and out of the building. 

The day-to-day usefulness of this is overwhelming. For example, it means that, if a client calls for a specific staff member and that employee is on holiday, the person answering the call is able to promptly advise the client on when the team member is due to return.

It is clear that using Timetastic really is a no-brainer; it has improved our own efficiency here at Dataplan and enabled us to better focus on our overriding priority – serving our clients rather than manual holiday forms and ugly holiday charts on our office walls.
 

Written by Jack SImpson
Published on September 19, 2018