New WhosOffice feature: customisable leave types

If you’re a global business struggling to keep track of your international colleagues, or you want better visibility over who’s working without compromising people’s privacy, WhosOffice is here to help.

We’ve just launched new ‘customised leave management’ capabilities, giving WhosOffice users greater flexibility to record different types of time off. With our latest feature, you can meet colleague requirements in every region, without making leave management more complicated.

New functionality based on user feedback

After listening to how our customers use WhosOffice, we heard some common challenges associated with coordinating staff movements that our software needs to accommodate. For example:

Managing maternity leave, paternity leave and sick leave across an international business when policies vary from country-to-country
Allowing employees to take leave that’s specific to their role or region, which can be factored in alongside standard time off such as holidays and time off in lieu
Tailoring how much information on each leave type can be seen, to protect sensitive information from being visible to the whole business – for example, blocking out time for a medical appointment without showing that’s why someone is out of the office

In response to these challenges, we have introduced an enhanced WhosOffice leave management feature to make tracking time off more transparent and flexible. So your business can accurately, securely coordinate every employee’s time off, capturing even more detail about the type of leave they’re taking than you could previously, in a way that works for your business.

Here’s more information on how to use our new customisable leave capabilities

Create localised leave types within global organisations

WhosOffice already enables companies to manage staff holiday alongside your shift planning tools, to integrate annual leave information when you’re creating employee schedules. However, our new customisable leave feature takes this service to the next level.

Now, you can add localised leave types that are only relevant to certain employees, to accommodate regional regulations and events. For example:

Reduction de temps de travail (RTT) for French staff members – additional full or half-days off to ensure that nobody in France works more than 218 days per year. RTT levels vary annually based on employees’ contracted hours and the number of public holidays in France each year.
Riduzione Orario di Lavoro (ROL) in Italy – up to 104 ‘reduction of work’ hours each year to cover personal commitments such as visiting the bank or parental appointments.
Personal days – most popular in the USA, these are flexible days off that an employee can take when they don’t feel able to work but aren’t unwell, as an alternative to using their annual leave. They can also be used for life events such as moving house or visiting relatives.
Hospitalisation leave – in some countries (such as Malaysia and Singapore) there are multiple absence management procedures depending on whether employees are ill enough to require hospital treatment. Employees are entitled to a longer period of statutory sick pay if their illness or injury results in hospitalisation.

Even if the type of leave is universal, the exact entitlements may vary from country-to-country. As we mentioned earlier, a good example of this is maternity and paternity leave: in Norway, parents can take a combined total of 48 weeks’ paid leave before and after the birth of a child, plus an additional 10 weeks at a lower rate of pay. In contrast, women in the USA are only permitted to take up to 12 weeks unpaid maternity leave.

With our latest WhosOffice feature update, you can ‘group’ employees that are entitled to specific leave types and make that option available through their WhosOffice account. This enables relevant staff members to benefit from schemes like RTT and ROL in line with local legislation, without ineligible colleagues in other countries being able to accidentally select this type of leave.

There are also separate settings available for administrators and general users. So senior personnel with global teams can view and approve local leave for their staff, even if they personally aren’t entitled to those leave types because they are based in a different country.

Set permissions for who can view and edit each type of leave

It’s not just location that makes leave management complicated. Some types of time off are more sensitive than others – and you don’t want every member of staff being able to see those entries on your holiday calendar.

WhosOffice’s customisable leave management feature enables you to select not only who is entitled to each type of leave, but also who can approve that time off and what groups can view details online. So you can customise which leave requests require sign-off, and which are visible to your wider workforce.

With this flexible approach to coordinating staff schedules, you will increase visibility while protecting people’s private information. For example:

All staff members can enter medical and dental appointments without having to request approval from their line manager or HR. Their colleagues can see they have an appointment that day, but notes containing further information on the type of appointment are kept private
If an employee has taken time off sick, that information can be entered into their personal record for WhosOffice administrators to view, but the general workforce can’t see how many sick days each person has taken off during the year
If staff members in a particular region are entitled to a local public holiday, this can be pre-entered into the holiday calendar by their manager or HR and made visible to colleagues in all countries. For example, international employees will know when their US compatriots have got the day off for Thanksgiving

Setting customised leave permissions enables your business to streamline simple updates, while securing sensitive information for time off that your employees may not want to share across the business. And it also allows you to set permissions that align with local data protection requirements, so you’re compliant in every region that your business has boots on the ground.

Use accurate leave information to improve shift planning

The main purpose of increasing the flexibility and transparency of our staff leave management feature is to help you improve shift planning and strengthen your employee communications.

When you’re planning the work rota, WhosOffice users have the option to ‘select extras’ within the employee scheduling feature. This instantly integrates staff leave data into the dates you are mapping out – so you don’t roster somebody who has an appointment, holiday or other local commitment.

You’ve always been able to do this on WhosOffice, but our new customisable leave feature means you’re capturing even more information on staff movements, to enhance your shift planning capabilities.

WhosOffice also gives you a real-time shift count based on integrated leave data, so you can see exactly who is working. And if something changes – for example, a team member calls in sick – that shift count figure will change as soon as their absence is recorded on our platform. So you have accurate information to hand when both planning schedules and allocating tasks during the course of each shift.

If you’d like us to walk you through WhosOffice’s new customisable leave capabilities, get in touch and we’d be happy to schedule a quick demonstration.