In this guide we’re zooming in for a closer look at one of our four pillars, Holidays, to give you some tips on how to roll out this feature for your teams. As with all our features, we have a bustling library full of support ready for you and you can always contact us too. For now, takeoff your socks and dip your toes into the cool waters of hybrid land holiday management.  

First Things First

Team Today is fully integrated with Microsoft Teams, so once you’ve set up your account with Team Today, pop along to our guide here to find out how to install the MSTeams app.  

Getting Set Up

To make sure the holiday feature works best for your company, you need to configure the settings to your requirements. In your Management tab, you will find Leave Settings. In here, you can add company or national holidays, and choose whether to enable holiday tracking, which lets colleagues see when people have leave planned across their team and others. This also helps with team and work planning, so it’s a brilliant tool.  

Enabling tracking opens the door to a range of functions. It allows you to configure the start and end dates of the company leave year, to set holiday allowances – both the default allowance for the company and, if you need it, individual variations – and to select if you need holiday requests to be subject to approval.

Approvals can be done by the company admin if you’re a small team without line managers. In a larger team, you may decide to have your line managers complete the approvals. Make sure you have toggled ‘Enable Line Managers’ in your Company Settings first. When all this is configured, you will receive emails for holiday requests, and you can approve or decline in the Leave section of the app.

Now You’re all Set, What Next?

How about a test drive of your shiny new holiday management system?

It’s always a good idea to have a go and get comfy with the new system before you roll it out fully. A good way to do this is to ask a colleague to help.

Invite them to Team Today, if they are not already a user; you can do this in Manage Users – Add User.  You can decide here if you want to add them as a line report or not. For this, in your user settings, tap your name, select ‘add new line report’ and then add the new user.

Then all you need to do is ask them to book a pretend holiday to test the system. Do make sure they know if’s a test though – you don’t want them thinking you’re sending them on an all-expenses paid vacation to the Bahamas.

Booking leave is as easy as configuring those first settings, and there are two ways to do it. In Whereabouts/TeamView, they can select the day and choose Holiday from the drop-down menu. If subject to approval, this will automatically trigger a request and be marked as ‘pending’. Or they can use the Leave Planner and select ‘add leave’.

A successful test will show that your team member can book leave with all the details they need to, that it appears in the system on the company planners, and that email notification and approvals, if set up earlier, will come to you; you can then approve or decline (if you wish to test this function as well) the request. Requests can be actioned in the Leave Planner tab if you hover over the dates in the month view or use the Approvals tab, and to make it even easier, you can filter in the top right which approvals to see.

Once approved, the holiday will be deducted from the overall allowance, so you and your teams can keep track of where they are up to.

What About National Holidays?

It’s a good idea to add any national or company holidays to the planner before you add in your users. If you are a multi-national company, it’s even wiser to add these in first as you’re likely to be looking at different days in different countries. You can add multiple offices in your Management tab under Offices, Desk Booking and CarParking.

National celebrations, religious days, company and team holiday events can all be included.  And if there are impromptu holidays that arise during the year – perhaps a national holiday for a Royal Coronation, these can still be added in by company admin.

To add your company-wide holidays, go into Leave Settings and select ‘Add a company-wide or national holiday’. You can include what the holiday details are, assign it to different offices and assign the date or block of dates. Once saved, the holiday will appear in all relevant company calendars and mean colleagues can’t book into the office for those dates.

And Individual Allowances?

Your company may have different allowances on top of the default. For instance, where team members can earn more holiday the longer they’re with you. So, we’ve enabled Team Today to let you configure allowances specifically for individual users. You can enter users’ allowances either in their own user entry in Manage Users or in the Leave Planner, under Reports where you will see down the right-hand side of the page an option to ‘Edit Holiday Allowance’ and this will take you a list of team members where you can update and save their holiday allowances. When users book leave, they will be aware of how much allowance they have used and how much remains.

Ready for the Off?

Consider yourself ready to roll out holidays to your team, but don’t forget one crucial thing – your team need to be all added to Team Today.  

In your trusty Management tab you will find Manage Current Users and Manage Teams. These sections will enable you to add your people and populate your teams.  

Your first 10 users are always free, and after 10 you will need to create a paid account. You can do this on a monthly or annual basis; simply go to Settings/Billing/Plan (not in the MSTeams app).

If you do have more than 10 users, to save you time, you can take advantage of Team Today’s onboarding service. All you need to do is request a template from Team Today and we will import your users for you. This has the benefit of getting everyone in and giving you chance to configure their entries before allowing them access.

If you have more than 50 people, we can still supply the template, or you can ask an IT admin to set up the sync between Active Directory and Team Today. The benefit of this is that joiners and leavers are automated into the system; you can automate teams, departments and line managers. Again, this gives you the opportunity to configure before inviting in.

Or, if you’d prefer to, simply invite people in straightaway, just tap the ‘Add User’ button in the Manage Users area in your Management tab.

And if you need any help with adding users or with any of the above, just send us a message at support@team-today.com.

Happy Holidays!

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Since we launched Team today, it’s reach has gone worldwide.  We’re now being used in 28 countries by tens of thousands of workers daily. Have a look at our features in more detail here and do get in touch with any questions to hello@team-today.com
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