How To Create a Vacation Calendar in Outlook

Everybody needs a vacation once in a while. In fact, did you know that taking a vacation is good for you? Whether you’re traveling, or you like to stay in your hometown, free days off from work enable you to get some perspective on things and let you recuperate from a busy schedule.

But we seem so stubborn to follow this advice. In the past decade, the use of paid vacation days significantly decreased. Americans are among the first ones to “ditch” vacations! Shockingly, up to 55 percent of Americans don’t use their vacation time at all! 

We entered the internet era with a hope we will be able to work less and earn more. And, why not, when all we could see was technological advancement. We should be able to profit on those gadgets. However, the reality is quite different. In fact, many people say they actually work more due to technological advancement.

However, tracking vacation days and days off is a no-joke. Especially if your company has a sizable workforce. Keeping track of your employee’s vacation schedules, sick days, days off and even the half days off can seem, and often is, an impossible task. 

Unless you have a system which can help you sleep peacefully at night.

Avoid embarrassing mistakes in payroll calculations due to miscalculated paid and unpaid days off. If you still haven’t found the system to do that we will guide you on how to make a vacation calendar in Outlook and give you some tips on how to track your employee’s absence without breaking a sweat.

How to create a vacation calendar in Outlook?

We might say that making a vacation calendar in Outlook is not a perfect solution for mid-sized to large businesses. However, if you are a small business owner, this might be the cheapest solution for you.

An employee can schedule vacation time in Outlook in a two-step process. First, an employee needs to notify coworkers about an upcoming vacation and add vacation time to their calendars. Second, an employee needs to block out vacation on their own calendar.

How employees can add their vacation time in their coworker’s calendars in Outlook?

Employees who are supposed to go on vacation need to mark the vacation time on their calendars. When they do mark vacation time as “out of the office” on their calendar, their coworkers will see they’re unavailable if they try to schedule an appointment with them.

Vacation calendar in Outlook enables employees to notify their coworkers when they want to go on a vacation at once and in advance without cluttering their calendars. This can be done by setting that employee’s vacation information appears on their calendars as an all-day event which is displayed as free time.

How employees can block out vacation time on their calendars?

Creating a vacation calendar in Outlook so far required of employees who are going on vacation to send the meeting request to their coworkers marked as free time. This process enabled them to prevent the blocking out time on other employee’s calendars, however the time on their calendar. That’s why the employees who’re scheduling vacation have to create an additional appointment for themselves to make others see they won’t be available during that time.

One more way to create vacation calendar in Outlook

One more way employees can create a vacation calendar in Outlook is by sharing their calendar with the rest of the team so they can view it in their own Calendar list.

Employees can create additional calendar folders which can be sharable too! For instance, employees are able to create calendar folders for specific projects and share them with their coworkers. They can give them permission to modify the events and appointments in it. This way employees can create a vacation calendar in Outlook and have a more organized workspace.

Even though these options are great, we would say they only work when small teams are involved. Bigger teams need more complex features which will enable them to seamlessly easy switch their vacation time in accordance with their company’s policies.

A simple solution for complex organizational problems

What would you say if we told you that we have a solution for scheduling vacation time for your employees that’s simple to use and takes minutes to install? Maybe you would shake your head in disbelief; however, we can tell you with certainty that it’s just a few clicks away from you. The time for scheduling vacations with this software will be significantly decreased compared to creating a vacation calendar in Outlook.

Vacation Tracker

This Slack integration will sweep you off your feet with it’s easy to use interface and useful features. It suits both for the small teams and middle-sized businesses and corporations. 

Installation takes seconds and it amazes us with its clean looks. All you need to do is to type \vacation into your Slack channel and scheduling vacation can begin. 

With Vacation tracker, managers don’t have to fear about losing track of their employees’ vacations. Vacation Tracker chatbot offers a daily summary of all pending requests and reports they can export in CSV files make tracking employees’ vacation days super easy.

The dashboard allows managers to easily approve or deny requests, manage notifications, and have an overview of the team’s time off. Coming to work and finding out the employee you were counting on is on vacation will never happen again. Vacation tracker will make it easy for you to stay in the loop and help you organize your workflow without breaking a sweat.

Among many things, we love Vacation tracker for is that teams don’t have to use multiple tools for managing their day to day business. No new passwords to remember, no complicated functions, Vacation tracker will be a perfect fit for every organization using Slack.

For the businesses that have multiple offices in a different location, Vacation tracker comes as a perfect solution. There’s even an option for setting up different administrators for each office to approve vacation days.

For businesses who go ahead of time vacation tracker offers a possibility of customizing leave type through the Settings page. Even though default leave type is vacations and days off, vacation tracker offers a huge variety of leave types ranging from PTO to paternity leave.

One more option we’re thankful for is synchronizing vacation information with Google Calendar, Outlook, and iCal.

There’s a free 14-days trial period where you can try all of the amazing features Vacation Tracker offers. 

Aleksandra Simović