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Here’s Why You Should Stop Using A Holiday Request Form

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Table Of Contents

We all know the feeling of requesting some time off in hopes that it will get approved soon enough so that you can be out in no time for your vacation. However, to your dismay, a holiday request form almost always turns your otherwise straightforward leave approval process into a frustratingly lengthy affair.

In Pitbull’s wise words, time is money. So in our age where anything is possible with technology, why do things the old-fashioned way? Ideally, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to request time off and have it approved. But in reality, this simply isn’t the case for companies that still use holiday request forms. 

What is a holiday request form?

A holiday request form, for those who do not know, is a form that employees are required to fill out whenever they wish to take a holiday from work. 

These forms are usually developed by the HR department of your company. The purpose of a holiday request form is to provide your employer with specific information about your vacation time that can be valuable to them. 

Usually, companies have separate a set of forms to fill out. These forms usually depend on the type of leave you want to take. For example, if you’re taking some time off for personal reasons, you may have to fill out a time off request form. Or if you’re feeling sick and wanna take a day off to recover, you will have to fill out a sick leave request form.

In any given case, these forms are a completely unnecessary addition to the leave approval process. Requesting leaves through these forms is not only time-consuming but also highly inefficient. You deserve better than that.

Here’s why you should stop using them

When a company uses holiday request forms to kickstart the leave approval process, it’s obvious there are some problems with the way they manage their employees’ time off. 

Your leave approval process gets delayed

Having a holiday request form in place is probably the biggest factor in delaying the standard leave approval process. 

It’s up to employees to request holiday forms, print them out, read, fill their information out, and then deliver them to HR. From there, the HR manager then looks over the form, sends it to the employee’s direct supervisor who either approves or denies the request in due time. The manager then sends it back to HR, after which the employee is notified of the outcome of the leave request.

We don’t know about you, but even picturing the lengthy manual leave approval process has us exhausted. Why spend hours waiting for a response when you can get one within minutes, at a fraction of the effort?

Leave management systems like Vacation Tracker make it so incredibly easy to request and approve leaves that you’ll wonder why you didn’t ditch using a holiday request form sooner. All it takes is just a few clicks to request leaves from your favorite collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Workspace.

Then, all you have to do is type in details like:

  • the duration of leave
  • the type of leave you’d like to take
  • a reason, if necessary
  • then hit Submit!

It’s a process simple as 1-2-3 and takes less than a minute to do. As soon as you do it, your Approver will either approve or deny the request. And, you’ll get notified instantly with the results. Talk about working smarter, not harder!

Limited access to your leave data

Do you remember how many leftover PTO days you’ve rolled over from last year? What about the number of vacation days you’ve already used up this month?

If looking for the answers to these questions has you scratching your head and is sending you into a downward spiral, you need to switch things up.

Typically when employees fill out a holiday request form, they are expected to know all about their leave history. It’s up to them to learn and keep track of the number of sick days, vacation time, or PTO they’ve used during a given year. The process of getting such information can sometimes take days, and there is a high risk of human error. 

Furthermore, if an employee submits a holiday request form with incorrect leave information, the request is likely to get denied. Instead, it’ll get sent back to you for review. Not only does this eat up valuable time, but can also delay your vacation plans. Or distract you from doing your actual work. It also ultimately leads you to get burned out.

So, you need to start using a leave management solution that allows you to keep tabs on your leave data in an easily accessible way. Here at Vacation Tracker, we do so by giving our users access to individual user profiles. These profiles are customized with each user’s leave information, giving you access to confidential leave information right when you need it.

There’s lots of room for human error

When it comes to manual leave tracking, there are literally an infinite number of ways human error can impact your workflow.

One coffee spill and your vacation request is gone for good. Another lost or misplaced file and your leave records are wiped out and gone forever. Even the smallest human mistakes could end up costing you a lot of money in the long run.

Storing information in countless paperwork around your office is bad not only for the environment but also for your company. Hence by automating your leave management, you can say goodbye to the ever-present risk of having leave data lost, misplaced, or deleted. Instead, you can store all your information on a secure platform in the cloud.

Furthermore, you can ensure that your confidential leave records are always available when you need them and never at risk of disappearing. In addition to that, since you’ll have fewer forms to print and fill out, you’ll use less paper. That means fewer trees will be cut down. So, you’ll be saving the earth and your sanity at the same time. Talk about a win-win situation!

And plenty more

While we’ve outlined the main reasons for avoiding holiday request forms at work, a leave management solution like ours can show you many more reasons for doing so. Try it out for yourself by signing up for a free 7-day trial to see how a tool like Vacation Tracker can streamline your leave approval process forever. You’ll thank us later!

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Snigdha Gupta
Snigdha Gupta

An avid writer and aspiring marketer, Snigdha is a student at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business.

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