For many businesses making sure there is always enough staff in to make sure that all of the work gets done as it should be done on a daily can be a major problem. Traditionally companies used to manage holiday planning and unexpected or short notice absences with a paper rota and noting things down in a staff diary. Now there is, and always was plenty of scope for a paper based holiday booking, holiday planning, and absence management system to go wrong.

For instance, the wrong holiday dates been written in the diary, rotas been drawn up without looking at the holiday planner, or the rota and / or diary going missing. Paper systems would mean that only each office or store management team would know the employees supposed to be working every day. Local or regional managers would find it hard to quickly find out why some branches, offices, or stores had enough workers on each shift and others did not when they were all supposed to have roughly the same number of staff. However, software staffing and holiday planning software when updated correctly can reduce the level of confusion in relation to staffing levels.

Companies that acquire their own holiday booking and absence management software are generally much better organized than the companies that still use ineffective paper systems, or do not have any kind of system at all. Although there are different types of software that can be used to establish such a system these all roughly work on the principles. Firstly, managers should need to know the minimum number of staff to make each shift viable, and the number of staff required to be most effective. CAFM’s software can be setup to warn managers when no more holidays can be allowed, or if letting one more member of staff take the day off could risk lowering the company’s productivity levels. In such cases managers could either turn down holiday requests or bring in covering staff from other parts of the company.

When the various software packages available to management are kept up to date then the information can be really useful for the purposes of forward planning. For example, if ten members of staff with young children want to take more time off during the school summer holidays workers without children or with grown up children could be asked if they would like to do extra shifts to make up for the people been on holiday. Alternatively, staff could be told that cannot have the whole time off, or temporary staff could be hired until staffing levels return to normal.

Once holiday booking and absence management software systems have been put in place then company managers need to inform staff if that changes working patterns and how advance notice of absence ideally has to be given.