Coordinate vacations and day off right in Jira

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In any organization staff is kind of a system, sometimes it can be called even a united organism. That’s why it can be a painful topic for both a team leader and the team, when it comes to an annual leave of one of the team members.

It doesn’t matter what the reason is for an employee’s absence, there is always the consequence. But you can make them less, and even optimize, if you take the situation under control beforehand and manage employee’s leave by creating a good off work timetable. 

Some companies use Google sheets or Excel for this purpose but in our opinion it’s not the best choice. The way of presenting information in these programs sometimes is not clear and not obvious enough to cut off mistakes with dates. Also, you have to use at least two different programs and switch between them, for example, Jira and Excel, to check dates of important projects and match them with dates of your team members’ leaves. And also, you need to find a way to inform your team about changes in a timetable. 

If you are already comfortable using Jira for any workflow you will especially like planning annual leaves through Jira. You don’t have to waste your time and energy by switching programs anymore so now your work is more efficient. Also, Jira provides automatic emails about employees’ annual leaves status to anyone who is concerned. 

If you are intrigued by what the process of an annual leave for an employee is in Jira, from creating a request till the stage when the employee gets back to work, you can check our workflow by the link.

Use employees’ absence visualization 

To take all the benefits of using Jira for scheduling, you can visualize the information that some employees are not at their workplaces in the calendar using the Calendar for Jira app.

When can it be useful?

For example, there is a rule in a company that team members with the same roles can’t get the same dates for their leave, because their absence influences the work of too many other members of the team.

In this case an employee, who wants to plan their leave, looks through Calendar to see the dates a teammate with the same role is taking their leave. After that the employee takes any free dates and marks them in the timetable, or talks to the colleague about changing dates.

Benefits of for teams and HR

What is the feature of Calendar for Jira in this case, and why is the app perfect for HR’s work optimization as well as for work team management?

The first thing is – customization can vary wildly up to your needs.

Any period of time you mark in Calendar creates an issue. You can choose the type of the issues as you prefer. 

Usually companies use types of issues as: vacation, sick leave and days off.

We can add some more ideas

• Training courses

Using Calendar, it’s easy for staff to enroll themselves to a training course they are interested in, and at the same time nobody is sent to a training course in the middle of an important project. And HR can easily get the list of participants for any course.

• Business trip

Not to look for employees when they are in a different city.

• In quarantine

The reality of the last two years. An employee can be healthy and full of energy working at home, but any physical contacts are restricted. 

The second important benefit of using Calendar for Jira is clear and easy-to-get visualization.

You can create a color code to any type of issue. You can use red for major and urgent issues, green for annual leaves and days off, purple for trips, or you can choose any other colors for issues – everything is up to you.

Creating such color code is a cool thing! You don’t have to read attentively an issue type in a timetable, all you need is to check the color.

You can go even further and separate your team into structured groups and set them different colors using JQL.  Then there wouldn’t be a situation that it was the time for a new update to be developed but all your key members started to go on their leave. 

When you plan a project, you can check in advance if there is any overlap with an important training course or annual leaves of members of the key groups. In case there are overlaps you can move the dates of your project or ask the group members to be understanding.

To learn how to use JQL in this case, please check the workflow.

Easy-to-get interface for users

This is the third great advantage. To plan a day off, for example, a user just needs to create an issue right in Calendar.

After that the user needs to pick up the issue type “day off” and set the timeline.

 

If an HR member wants to send an employee to a training course or a business trip, the HR member needs to make the same steps as we showed above and also set the *Assignee field.

Every plan and change is made in Jira so you don’t have to think about the right way to inform users about training courses or business trips. You can set that any type of information in Calendar is available to any user anytime. 

If you have any questions about the app, its setting or usage, we are happy to consult you.