Improve your holiday planning with EPS

It’s that time of year again. December is here and you have to be thinking ahead to the new holiday year if yours runs from January.

So while holidays might be particularly on people’s minds, we thought it was a good time to give some tips on managing and planning your team’s holiday throughout the year, and how EPS can support you.

1. Provide employees with visibility of balances and current status of requests

As anyone working in hospitality knows, it’s all about communication, so keeping employees constantly informed about how much holiday they’ve taken or got left to take is crucial. It is also important to let your team know what the response to their holiday requests is – approved, pending, or declined – so they don’t feel left in limbo. All of this information is available to employees on the MyEPS app which comes as part of the EPS package, at no extra cost.

2. Ensure holiday balances are accurate against employees’ contracts and the company handbook by calculating employees’ length of service and birthday bonuses

Holidays are important to employees as they require rest and the ability to recharge after busy periods of working, and additional holiday is a key way of rewarding employees for their diligence and loyalty. There are reports in the EPS system which provide information about employees’ length of service so extra holiday entitlement can be granted, and there is also the possibility of automating the provision of additional holiday for length of service.

3. Black out days to give employees visibility of days that are available

Returning to the importance of communication, it is helpful to tell employees when the business is too busy to request holiday. There is the ability to black out certain days, so it is not possible for employees to ask for time off on them. This in turn will enable employees to plan around these periods and request holiday at other times.

4. Encourage employees to take holiday during quiet periods to prevent large end-of-year pots

In a similar vein, ask employees to request their holidays when your business is quieter. You will know when those periods are and there are reports in the EPS system which will help indicate when fewer employees were scheduled during the previous year.

5. Monitor earn vs burn of holiday throughout the year

This is the key piece of information to know when managing and planning your employees’ holiday – how much they’re earning against how much they’re burning. There are myriad reports in EPS to help show the holiday accrued and the holiday taken, and the costs of both.

If you are a current client and feel you could utilise more of the EPS system to help with holiday planning, please get in touch with us. If you are not a client but you are interested in finding out more about EPS, the leading people management system for hospitality, please email info@eproductive.com and someone will contact you.