Managing and approving your employees’ time off (PTO) is one of the most important aspects of running a business. As the holiday season approaches, you'll have many employees requiring time off all at once. Whether it’s Memorial Day, Easter Sunday, or Christmas, as an employer you want to allocate pay accurately to ensure your employees are being compensated fairly and consistently. Our Time Off feature provides a transparent, quick, and easy solution for this - to add holiday pay to multiple employees at once using our bulk actions capability.
In this article, we will cover how you can oversee and manage holiday pay while using Connecteam as an all-in-one solution.
Step 1: Customize a Holiday Time Off Policy
When it comes to holiday pay, businesses will most likely add pay for their employees without using an existing balance. In other words, there will not be a cap on the amount of holiday PTO employees are eligible for. For this reason, we'll walk you through how to create a holiday policy as a paid, unlimited policy.
How to Create a Policy Type
The first step in creating a brand new Time Off policy is to create a new policy type. To the right is where you set all of your time off policies. To create a time off policy for holiday pay, navigate to the policy section and select a paid policy. Click on + Add Type to create a new policy type.
Let's create a paid custom policy called "Holiday". To do so, click on Custom, and manually type out "Holiday".
How to Set Policy Details
After creating a new policy type, let's continue to create a policy for your users to be assigned to.
Navigate to the Holiday policy type you have just created and click on Add Policy.
Name the policy - this is where you choose if you're creating the policy for your full-time employees, a specific department, or for another group of staff.
Choose the units - select if the holiday time will be displayed in hours or days.
When asked if we want to set a limit, let's choose 'No, it's unlimited' since we are creating an unlimited policy.
Set the general settings. Choose which work days the policy applies to and the work hours per day.
As a manager, you may want to have control over adding holiday pay for your employees. Therefore, mark the box for 'time off request requires admins approval' and determine the minimum time in advance users may request time off.
Assign the policy to users. Select the relevant users from the list or use the filter to quickly find and select users who meet your desired criteria.
Step 2: Add Holiday Time Off Using the Bulk Actions Capability
With Christmas approaching, it's time to add holiday time off for your employees! Your company policy dictates all employees are entitled to holiday pay; that's a lot of employees/time off to handle. Adding time off in bulk will save you the time normally spent manually adding time off per employee. On top of that, you're saving energy in ensuring accuracy and avoiding mistakes, as it prevents you from missing any user or adding time off for the wrong dates.
Let's go over how to do so:
On the Time Off dashboard, choose the policy type from the dropdown list.
Mark the box at the top of the list to select all users, or hover over each user’s line and mark the box individually. A blue actions button will appear, click on it, and choose Add time off.
Insert the relevant details for a holiday and click Add time off. If users are assigned to more than one time clock, choose which time clock to add it to.
Take a look at the whole process from beginning to end:
Step 3: Continue to Manage Time Off After It's Been Added
As an all-in-one solution, Connecteam gives you the tools to take time off one step further. Let's go through how else you can utilize the platform for all your business needs, beyond simply adding holiday pay for your employees.
Notify Your Employees Using Updates
After adding holiday pay, you'll want to notify your employees that they have received holiday pay and announce they have a week-long vacation from work. There's no better way to share this news than by creating an update using our Updates feature. In addition to being a great tool for raising employee morale and increasing company-wide transparency, it enables employees to plan ahead and take advantage of their time and money.
Create an Update in just a few steps!
Navigate to the Updates feature on your sidebar.
Click Add New.
Choose from one of our holiday templates or create your own.
Customize your update - type the message, choose different decorative backgrounds, or use the color wheel, and add images and other attachments.
Add a Shortcut to the Time Off feature so that users can head straight to the Time Off page to check if they received holiday pay.
Assign the content to smart groups or select employees.
Review all publishing settings. Schedule the update for at least one week before the holiday and customize the push notification.
Click Confirm and you're all set!
For more information about Updates, check out this article!
Check Your Employees' Timesheets in the Time Clock
On your employee's timesheets, you'll see a dedicated row for holiday time off. Keep in mind, since time off is assigned to one time clock only (to avoid double pay), holiday time off will only appear on the employee's timesheet for the assigned time clock. When exporting payroll, you'll see the holiday time off calculated into the pay as well.
Take a look at how it appears on the employee's timesheet:
View Absences in the Job Scheduler
As part of an all-and-one solution, Connecteam's Time Off feature lets you see approved time off on the Job Scheduler. Holiday time off will appear on all schedules employees are assigned to, so you can instantly see who's off for the holiday and plan your shifts around these constraints.
Take a look at how it appears on a schedule:
For more information about the Job Scheduler, check out this article!
Step 4: Set a Reminder to Add Time Off for the Next Holiday
Now that you've added holiday time off for Christmas, you start thinking ahead to next year's holidays. You may be wondering how to best remind yourself and your admins to add time off for New Year's Day. As an all-in-one solution, our Quick Tasks feature can help you schedule tasks before each holiday to remind you to add time off as the holiday approaches. The Quick Tasks feature is great for managing your day-to-day operations, including delegating tasks and keeping track of important assignments.
Begin by planning out the year - list all upcoming bank/federal and religious holidays, the dates you are granting holiday time off for, and the period of time by which you must add time off (for example, in correlation to the relevant payroll cycle). This will make it easier to input the data all at once.
You can create a single task or multiple tasks. For our purposes, we will create multiple tasks to plan ahead when to add each holiday's time off.
Create multiple tasks for upcoming holidays
You can easily and efficiently add all upcoming holidays using the multiple tasks function, which enables you to add them all at once on one screen.
Navigate to the Quick Task Category.
Click the + Add Task icon on the top right of the screen and choose Add multiple tasks.
Each row is a task for adding time off for each holiday. Schedule the start and due dates for the task to correlate to the date range for the relevant payroll cycle. Assign to the task admins who are also responsible for adding time off for their employees.
Click Add tasks at the bottom right of the screen.
Take a look at how you can use the multiple tasks function to schedule the tasks:
Here's how it looks when editing an individual task:
If you are unsure how to get started with Quick Tasks, check out this article!
💡 Tip: Use our Shortcuts feature to link the Time Off feature to the task.
Frequently Asked Questions
Most of my staff is off for a holiday, but since we operate on the holiday a few will work and will get an extra vacation day. How can I add this vacation day to their balance?
If you have a limited time off policy in addition to a holiday policy, you can add a vacation day (or days) by editing the balance for existing employees. To do so, first navigate to the employee's user card. You can reach the user card via the Users feature on the sidebar or by hovering over their profile picture in the Time Off feature, and clicking on Profile.
On the user card, go to the Time off tab and find the relevant policy. Click on Edit balance. Add the number of hours that are equivalent to the number of vacation days they need to receive (1 day = 8 hours, 2 days = 16 hours).
Check out how to do it from start to finish:
To learn more about changing users' time off balance, check out this article.
We have holiday pay but it's not unlimited. How should we set that up?
When setting up the policy details, you're asked if you want to limit the amount of time employees can take. Choose the option, Yes, there is a limit. Then, set accrual settings to be either fixed or hourly. Next, you will need to set the determined accrual settings, meaning when your employee receives their accrued time off. These can be set to either all at once (at the beginning of the year), on the employee's anniversary date, or throughout the year in the payroll period.
For a step-by-step process, learn here How to Set Time Off Policies (Paid/Unpaid).
Summary
In this article, we went over how you can use Connecteam's Time Off feature to add holiday pay. We discussed why it's important to track and how you can use the Time Off feature to do so. We went over how to set up a holiday time off policy and how to add it in bulk to all your users. Then, we discussed how you could use Connecteam as an all-in-one solution to continue managing holiday time off, such as notifying your employees, checking payroll, planning your schedule ahead of time, and how to stay on top of all upcoming holidays by setting reminders. Lastly, we went over some frequently asked questions. Now you're all set to start the holiday season and be confident you're not missing anything or anyone!
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*Bulk actions are available from the HR & Skills Advanced plan*
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