TABLOO Vacation Plan
Every year in January, companies have busy times planning holidays. That can cause a big headache even in a small company, not to mention large companies with many employees where work is based on schedules.
Where can I find information on how to fill the holiday application? Who should I send it to now? How many holidays can I use? These questions seem familiar, right? Beginning of year and all the fuss with planning of holidays - there must be a way to ease the headache? A Microsoft toolset is here to help. These days, calculation of earned and used holidays may easily be entrusted to computer programs, so that the whole planning system could be as reliable, accurate and user friendly as possible. As an additional capability of intranet TABLOO, Primend has created a convenient application with workflows for planning and approval of holidays, using the services of Microsoft 365 and PowerApps. Why is holiday planning important?
Why it is so important?
An employer can only manage the holiday periods for employees if a holiday schedule is created and the employees are informed of that by March 31st. Creation of a time schedule makes it possible for the employer to plan the work better, consider the holiday wishes of employees, requirements for substitution, and it helps to avoid situations where all the employees are on holiday simultaneously. If the employer has not created or announced the holiday schedule by March 31st, every employee may take a holiday at the desired time, informing the employer of that 14 calendar days in advance, and the employer cannot help it, having not used their opportunity to manage the holidays of the employees. Thus, it is significantly more convenient for all the parties to have the holiday schedule prepared in accordance with the law. This way, the employer retains a possibility to distribute the work load, and the employees have the certainty to plan their holiday trips and other activities in a long term.
The employer must register the annual holiday and the unused holiday from the last period in the holiday schedule, but it is also possible to add other holidays, e.g. paternity leave, child care leave, study leave or other holidays provided in the internal regulations of the company. The employer shall consider that the employee must be able to use their holiday before it expires, i.e. within two years.
The annual holiday is generally split into parts consisting of weeks. In such an event, at least one part of the holiday must be 14 consecutive calendar days long. The employer may refuse to split the annual holiday into parts shorter than seven days but in the event of an agreement, also shorter annual holidays are permitted.
Holidays must be enabled to the following persons at a time suitable to them:
• to a woman immediately before and after the maternity leave or immediately after the child care leave
• to a man immediately after the child care leave or during the maternity leave of his wife
• to a parent raising an up to 7-year-old child
• to a parent raising a 7- to 10-year-old child, during the school holiday
• to a minor subject to compulsory school attendance during the school holiday
Considering all the circumstances, the normally quite complicated planning of the holiday schedule has been made easy for the users of the additional solution to intranet Tabloo thanks to the Power Automate tools.
Some companies require an approval round also for the entries of a holiday plan. That is basically possible but means pointless fussing with papers, as when holiday wishes are submitted to a manager one by one, they do not have the complete picture required for decision-making, and thus some holidays will inevitably require renegotiation and shifting later on. It is reasonable to approve the holiday schedule once the holiday wishes of all the employees have been entered into one view, so that the required substitutions could be considered in the planning workflow right away.
If a company has no separate solution for planning holidays, the regular holiday planning process is significantly more complicated, starting from exchanging of various e-mails between the personnel department, accounting managers, substitutes and employees to manually writing applications and finally passing the approval round. But what makes it all so painful is the fact that someone has to collect all the data and enter them in the correct cells in some table, so that the manager would even have a complete view of the holidays in order to make the required changes. Here, also the risk factor of human error should be considered, nearly at every stage. Tabloo intranet solution ensures that the holidays related to each employee are in one system and they are changed in real time and are up-to-date. The solution makes it possible to display their prescribed holidays to each employee and from there they can also submit the required applications, which are automatically submitted to the direct supervisor and the selected substitutes for approval, who are aware of the whole picture in order to make the required decisions. It is just as simple to change the holidays that have already been approved.
In addition to the above, the system also considers all the national holidays, which makes the management of all the holidays much easier and more manageable for all the parties. All the information is always up-to-date and available to everyone and the risks of human error, forgetting, incorrect entries, etc. are eliminated. The trouble of exchanging letters and passing approval rounds is reduced. Tabloo holiday solution simplifies the process considerably both for the company and the employee.
