I think we can all agree that the team management and employee scheduling paradigm has shifted pretty drastically since the pandemic. The way that we work and plan has undergone deep changes due to the need for remote work that arose two years ago.  Many employees and managers the world over have realized that completely on-premises work is often unnecessary, and as a result, workforces have naturally become less immediately accessible than they once were. This has in turn affected the way that we as managers need to approach HR solutions, and has made HR scheduling and human resource management more important than ever. The nature of management has changed and maintaining a cohesive work unit with only traditional means and methods is not only inefficient but often insufficient. As you may have read in some of our past pieces on resource management failure to optimize logistical processes in the realm of resource management is tantamount to waste and loss.  Not only are you failing to achieve optimal performance, but you also risk losing what efficiency you currently maintain.  Many processes that could once have been achieved with a simple colloquial conversation now must be dealt with more precisely, including processes in the area of personnel management.  

Leave requests are one such area of personnel management that requires increased accuracy and consideration now more than ever. As portions of your workforce work from home, contributing their input remotely and digitally, it can become increasingly difficult to keep track of not only who is doing what but also who is even working at any given time.  Without a sufficient leave tracking system, you are liable to inadvertently under schedule and leave gaps in your output capacity. For instance, if you over-grant leave on a particularly busy week you may not have the manpower necessary to achieve your allotted tasks. Likewise, you may accidentally schedule a work package during a period when an employee necessary to the completion of that work package has been given leave and is unable to complete it. both scenarios create waste and in fact, may damage your image as a business, and both scenarios are the fault of the scheduling manager and can easily be avoided with capable leave management or leave request system.  Leave scheduling, like so many other aspects of business, is primarily practiced in logistics, and so we must apply a logistically sound approach, a methodical one that minimizes the possibility of mistakes and miscalculations.

And with that, we arrive at leave request tools.  Enterprise tools and especially digital enterprise tools provide management and employees with a structured workflow that acts to reduce missteps.  Digital tools are now a nearly ubiquitous element of daily business operations and have benefitted businesses almost incalculably. These tools should be leveraged in all areas that their benefit exceeds their cost, and that extends to personnel logistics and leave request systems. Here at Infowise, we are particularly partial to Sharepoint. Microsoft’s offering is a powerful multi-use enterprise intranet and collaboration tool with vast capabilities out of the box. That being said, we felt that we could further improve it for institutional and business use, so we created the Ultimateforms platform. Ultimateforms introduces the ability to create and interact with fully customizable and fully integrated dynamic forms and connects seamlessly to the rest of the Office 365 environment.  In simple terms, Ultimateforms introduces the ability to create and apply custom solutions to all of your business’s logistical needs.  Leave request systems are one such area that Ultimateforms is perfectly suited for and can easily be dealt with even out of the box with no customization at all. The product comes pre-equipped with a complete leave request solution that can be further customized at your behest depending upon your institution's exact specifications. Our expert in-house Sharepoint development team released a webcast on this topic recently, so I urge you to take a look at that for a complete breakdown of how the system works. If you would like to schedule a complete Demo Ultimate Forms now! of the system so as to determine whether or not it is a good fit for your business, we offer an extensive demo program, so please feel free to sign up for that- Until next time!