How to plan your company holiday calendar for 2020

A new year provides the perfect opportunity to reflect on your goals as a business and how you could improve in order to best achieve them. A key objective for many companies is determining how they can better deal with staff leave management – in order to best meet the needs of their business, whilst ensuring that all staff can take their full holiday entitlement.

With that in mind, there are some ways to better plan your staff annual leave calendar for 2020:

Revaluate your holiday policy

Before moving forward, it’s wise take a brief step back and evaluate which aspects of your holiday policy are working for you and which problems pertaining to staff leave, are left for you to solve:

For instance, did you have too many employees taking leave at the same time? Were you caught short on staff during busy periods? Do you frequently find yourself with employees with a glut of holiday left at the end of the year, which they then need to take all at once?

Once you can pinpoint your most pressing issues, you can consider how to you amend your holiday policy in order to solve them.

Remind staff of your leave policy

If you make any changes to your holiday policy, the new year is the ideal time to present them to your employees. However, if your policy remains the same, it’s still a great opportunity to remind them of its most important aspects – especially as they’re likely to start considering their vacation plans. Reiterate how much annual leave they’re entitled to (and if they’ve earned an increase in their allowance) and how much notice they’re required to give.

Offer greater visibility

If it’s not something you’re doing already, offer greater visibility of your company’s holiday calendar. Though there are a number of ways to achieve this, the simplest and most effective is with a centralised, online leave management system.

With such a system, employees can see which of their colleagues are away on prospective holiday dates, making them likely to avoid putting in requests for dates that are likely to be denied. This means less admin for both them and HR or management. They’ll also have a snapshot of important dates for the company – which they’ll need to work their holidays around.

For management, as well as handling fewer leave requests, they’ll have a better view of who’s out of the office, be it due to holidays, sick days, remote working, or off-site meetings and events. All of which can be tracked through good leave management software.