Managing holidays in Microsoft Teams

Look no further: Team Today makes managing holidays easy.

Managing holidays in the workplace can be complex. There’s a lot to think about. Policies, allowances, approvals, paperwork, staff cover, work planning. By their nature, holidays are individual to each team member, and drawing all the data together about who is away and when can be lengthy, but it’s important to do to be able to manage teams and workloads efficiently.

Companies have employed several ways to cope with this. For instance, emailing invites to share holiday bookings in colleagues’ calendars, creating colourful Excel spreadsheets with teams and their vacation days featured, and even using special vacation tracking software, though often these can be tricky to use and make it a more laborious task.  

But what if there was a way to manage your company holiday planning so that the hard work is removed?

Look no further. Team Today makes managing holidays easy. No more outdated Excel holiday spreadsheets, no more toing and froing with holiday emails, no more emailing calendars invites to each other about your holidays, and not a cluttered calendar in sight.
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Before We Begin

Team Today syncs with Microsoft Teams so that you can use all features without having to leave the Teams interface, everything happens in there. And it syncs perfectly straight to your Outlook, Gmail or Teams calendar.

Logging Holidays in Teams

We built Team Today around four pillars: Whereabouts, Desk Booking, Work Planner, and Holidays. And it’s this one we’re delighted to introduce to you today.

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes with our Holidays feature, but what you see and experience is a brilliantly simple and user-friendly tool. In a nutshell, it allows you to log your vacation time, share this with colleagues, track your allowances, and help you plan work. You can enter any holiday or paid time off, with details of where you’re going, when and for how long. And whether it’s a two-week summer jaunt to the seaside or a personal day, you can input the information and watch it appear immediately in your calendar.

All holidays you enter into Team Today are also included in the company Work Planner, meaning they become visible to the wider team. Colleagues can see team vacation information at-a-glance and use this information for planning work and looking ahead to deadlines. It also removes the need to hunt back through emails to find out if Tom from Accounts is away or ringing around to see when Diane in Design is due back. It’s all there for you.

Managing Holidays in Teams

Team Today makes managing team holidays much more straightforward for managers. Our Management section allows you to enter company-wide holiday allowances and holiday allowances specific to individual team members. As team members book in vacation time, Team Today calculates their remaining allowance and displays it to them simply. So, there is no last-minute scramble at the end of the holiday year, when team members realise they’ve got holiday left to take. And it helps managers to identify any points where there are multiple absences that need to be covered or reviewed, and of course to make sure that there are always staff in the office who have compliance and health and safety responsibilities such as Fire Wardens and First Aiders.  

Company-specific holidays can be added centrally, and this will block out the time on everybody’s planner and calendar. Likewise, with national holidays and any state or provincial days, you can enter these too. Everything is then updated and synced to Work Planner and Outlook.

We’ve included the option to turn on holiday approvals for teams where holiday needs to be authorised, and our reporting function allows you to generate holiday reports, to see instantly where everyone is up to and who has holiday outstanding.

We know how important flexibility is and we’ve built the feature to be a flexible tool for your organisation, for you to use as little or as much as you need. Be it the whole bells and whistles of what we offer, or a smaller sample, Team Today enables the most efficient use for your business.

Now you’ve been introduced to this feature, why not find out more detail on our staff holiday planner for Microsoft Teams here. And remember you can always contact us with any questions or to arrange a demo at hello@team-today.com.