We take a look at a selection of tools that can help you with employee holiday planning and productivity at your small or medium sized business.
Running a small business isn’t easy. Between your company’s finances, sales and every day running, there is a lot to think about – without even touching upon HR and employee management.
To make your life a little easier, we have done the research and put together a selection of tools that can help you manage your staff holidays and boost productivity.
Project Management
The right project management software can depend a lot on your team & employees.
If you have very technical employees, your team might need very different software to if you are running a sales team, or any number of other types of business or service.
There are now hundreds of different pieces of specialised software tools and apps that are custom made to work for a particular profession.
Basecamp is one tool that is used widely as a project management system for small businesses.
Teamwork is another provider that is frequently used by more digital orientated companies.
Staff Holiday Planning
With employee holiday management software you can allow your staff self-service access to their own holiday records, as well as allow you as the administrator the ability to view and manage all the data.
Allowing staff to instantly see and book their own holiday entitlement has two benefits: it saves you and your managers time, and allows you to cut down on forms, paperwork and redundant time across the whole business.
Tempora produce a staff holiday planner that provides all the above functionality, and also ties into their timesheet management software which allows users to see the clients that are costing the most money.
The Tempora tool allows admins the ability to see overlapping absences among staff, meaning you can see if more than one employee has tried to book holidays at the same time. You can also approve/disprove absences, record sickness and highlight patterns of regular absence.
Communication Tools
Using the right communication tools in your business can help your employees achieve your business goals faster and more efficiently.
In the realm of desktop, mobile, voice and video chat – Skype is undoubtedly one of the most famous and widely spread communication tools.
Google+ Hangouts are really interesting, and are a great way of up to 10 people joining a simultaneous video/voice chat. You need to use your Google+ profiles, but if everyone is set up in Google-friendly environment these are easy to set up and an awesome way of joining multiple people in different locations together on a project.
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If you have a favourite tool or something you would like to share, you can fill in a comment.
Main image, adapted from an image by Berliner.Gazette @ Flickr.
