Fair Vacation Scheduling: Staff Management Settings You Should Know About

Humanity has a lot of features to offer and we are aware that fair vacation scheduling and staff availability are two features that you value. Vacation and availability are two of the challenges that a scheduler must face to create a functional work schedule. Now, I’ll explain each Vacation/Availability Setting in the Humanity application.

Under the ‘Admin’ tab, click on ‘Account Settings’ on the left sidebar and scroll down to ‘Vacation/Availability Settings’. This will be what you see:

Employees can set weekly availability

If this option is checked, it allows your employees to have the option to set their ‘Weekly Availability’ times. By default, this feature is enabled.

Deduct weekends from vacations count

This option allows you to select certain days to noted as a “weekend” and not count towards employee vacation day count. For example, if your business does not count Sundays and Saturdays toward employee vacation time, select these two days in this field.

If an employee requested vacation time from Thursday to Monday, their vacation count will only be counted as 3 days.

Employees can set future availability

If this option is selected, it will enable your employees to set ‘Future Availability’. It allows them to set staff availability for future one-time events and meetings that prevent work that day. By default, this feature is enabled.

NOTE: If this event is a recurring event, we recommend you use ‘Weekly Availability’ instead. The scheduling feature defaults to what is set for the weekly staff availability and then allows the ‘Future Availability’ option to override those settings for each individual day.

Availability must be approved by management

If this option is checked, it requires managerial approval before employees can finalize changes made to their ‘Weekly Availability’ and ‘Future Availability’. By default, this feature is disabled.

Employees can book vacations

If this option is selected, employees will be able to request vacation time through the system. By default, this feature is enabled.

Vacations must be booked X in advance

This option requires employees to request vacation time in advance. It varies from anytime to 3 months prior to vacation. By default, it is set to 1 week prior to the vacation day.

Max number of staff that can be booked off at once

This will only allow X number of employees to be on vacation at the same time. By default, it is set to allow 10 employees to have vacations at the same time. This value can go from 1 staff member to 100 staff members.

Max number of vacation days per year that a staff member is allowed

This option sets the maximum number of vacation days per year that an employee is allowed to take. By default, this field is set at 12 vacation days per year.

The individual employee setting ‘Max number of vacation days per year’ will override this ‘Store Default’ setting. (This individual employee setting is under the ‘Staff’ tab, select a staff member, click on ‘Edit Details’ and scroll down to ‘Max number of vacation days per year’. By default, this is set to ‘Store default’.)

Availability Change Requests are effective

Here you can set the effective date for when your staff availability changes will become effective. By default, this is set at immediately.

Fair vacation management is now possible with Humanity’s state-of-art employee scheduling software.