Intro: Take advantage of our user-friendly absence management
When you are planning rotas while being caught up in your daily business, you quickly lose track of who is available and who is not. Learn how Smartplan can help.
When your rotas meet reality, one of the things that can potentially bring a lot of chaos into your original planning are sudden absences. When we speak of “absences”, this can refer to a variety of things such as:
- Illness
- Vacation
- Bank holidays
- Family emergencies
- Vocational training
- Reducing overtime
If you choose to do your shift planning in Smartplan, in most cases it would make sense to use our Absence Management System, too. This way, you have all the information in one place and you can directly incorporate new absences into your work schedules. By creating absences in Smartplan and displaying them in your rotas, the whole team will always be in the loop about who is currently missing and who will fill in to cover the shift instead.
Let’s have a closer look at how absences are being handled in Smartplan.
The “Absence Calendar”
We have chosen to display absences inside a calendar, because we believe this will give you the best possible overview on all your absences. It will make it easy for you to spot the times where many of your workers are not available and, therefore, are especially critical. It’s also a great way to ensure a fair distribution of your workers during the holiday season. You can find the absence calendar in the “
Absence” tab in the main menu of your Smartplan account.
Both
Admins and
regular users can create absences, and all these absences will be displayed in your absence calendar. The only difference is that when a regular user creates a personal absence, this is then classified as a pending absence request, which needs admin approval first to come into effect.
Each absence is connected to an absence type, so that you can keep an overview of what your team’s absences are related to generally. You can
create and adapt these absence types based on how your business works.
How absences connect to the rest of the system
Now, the great thing about this absence system, apart from the simplified overview for you, is that it is connected with your rotas as well. What does that mean? When creating absences, Smartplan automatically checks whether the person has assigned shifts during the absence period. If that is the case, you can then decide with a simple click, what should happen to these shifts:
The other way around, you also have the option to display the absences in the rota. This can be a huge help if you have to adjust your rota due to these absences. The approved absences will appear at the top of each day. And if you want to give the shift of the absent person to someone else, Smartplan will tell you who is still available during that time:
This reduces the risks of accidentally assigning an absent employee to a shift close to zero.
Keep track of certain absences with our Holiday Account
The holiday account is an additional function that can be used together with our absences. It allows you to choose an absence type of your liking and then set up tracking for this absence type for the duration of a year. Most commonly our customers use it to track their employees‘ holidays and to quickly figure out how many days they have left of their yearly holiday allowance.
If this could be of interest to you, make sure to take a look at this article:
The holiday account
Further reading
There is much more to learn about Smartplan. In relation to the absence management, you might also want to read into:
- Hours & Salary: With Hours & Salary you can quickly get a feeling for your employees’ hours, absences as well as salaries. It is a great tool to uncover patterns of who has been absent a lot or who has accumulated a lot of overtime.
- Excel Exports: We offer an export of your employees’ hours into Excel. Included in this file is a list of all the absences in the chosen period.
- Time Balances in combination with absences: The Time Balances are a tool to keep track of the overtime that your employees have accumulated. Creating absences can influence your employees’ Time Balances, so make sure to learn how before you start setting up Time Balances.