Efficiency Improvements for Absence Management

Managing absences is a core task for HR managers. But depending on your absence policy, headcount, and number of office locations, it can become complex and time-consuming.

To ease the workload, we’ve made several small but effective improvements to our absence management feature.

Enhanced Public Holiday Calendars

Public holidays differ from country to country, and sometimes even regions within a country may celebrate specific public holidays that are not observed elsewhere. Adding these holidays to your Absence Calendar ensures that employees and managers are informed about upcoming absences and can plan their workloads accordingly.

In flair, public holidays can be imported for specific office locations. Now, to add further flexibility and ensure no regional holidays are missed, you can create your own customized holiday calendars independent of office location.

Using the new Calendars page in our HR app, you can create a new calendar. Public holidays will then be automatically added from specific countries and regions, or you can manually add any other holiday periods you wish to observe.

Once you have created your calendar, you can assign it to any employee in their workload. This allows you to create custom holiday calendars for employees, no matter which office location they are assigned to.

See how it works in our Help Center guide.

Use Cases for Absence Managers:

• Define the applicable public holidays for employees regardless of their location
• Add public holidays to remote employees’ calendars
• Automatically add region-specific public holidays

Prevent Time Tracking on Days Off

For some types of absences, such as vacation, sick leave, and public holidays, you may want to prevent employees from tracking work time.

To make this easy, we’ve added a new checkbox to the absence category creator. Simply check the Time Tracking Restricted box when creating a new absence category or editing an existing one. This will block employees from tracking time during this type of absence.

You can leave this checkbox unchecked for absence categories during which employees may not be in the office but are still required to track time. Working from home and business trips are two examples where this would be the case.

Organize Your Absence Categories

Some companies offer many different kinds of leave as part of their company policy. Besides ordinary vacation days, employers may also offer a set number of work-from-home days, compensatory time off for overtime, bereavement leave, well-being days, educational leave, and more.

To make it easy for you and your employees to keep an overview, you can now easily change the order in which these absence categories appear. Simply go to Absence Settings in the flair HR app and click and drag the Absence Categories to define the order.

You can also group categories to provide an even clearer structure. The changes you make in Absence Settings will also be applied to the Employee Hub. So it makes sense to put the most commonly used type of absence at the top of the list so employees can easily find them. This also helps prevent employees from accidentally requesting the wrong type of leave.

Check out all three of these improvements in the flair HR app today and see how they can save you time.