Absences and capacity in weekly planning

On Monday morning a manager opens the schedule and realizes that on Wednesday they planned two days of work for someone who is on holiday. Nobody hid it from them. The absence had been announced, just in a calendar the schedule cannot see.

Surprises like that are not a sign of poor organization. They happen when absences and planning are two separate lists, so somebody has to compare them by hand, and nobody does it often enough.

Where absences and the plan drift apart

There are usually three points:

• The absence is announced late or verbally. The manager finds out only after the plan already exists.
• Approval and schedule do not talk to each other. The absence lives in one tool, the schedule in another, so capacity is calculated from memory.
• A partial absence is forgotten. A business trip or working outside the office does not last the whole day, but the person still does not have full capacity.

Announcing an absence

In UnitLook an absence is announced with a single form. You choose the employee, the absence type, the start and end date, and optionally a note. An employee who may only announce for themselves sees a shorter list.

Most types work in whole days. There are two exceptions: business trip and working outside the office require a date and a time, in 15-minute steps. That is how a full day off is told apart from a few hours away from the office, and that difference decides how much more work can be planned.

A new announcement has the status awaiting approval. On the Approval tab the manager sees what is waiting and decides with one click, with a note if they want.

What happens after approval

An approved absence is not just a record. It goes to two places:

• the monthly overview, where next to hours you also see the type of absence: annual leave, sick leave, paid leave, working from home, a private absence or working outside the office,
• the planning capacity for those days.

That way the absence does not have to be retyped anywhere. The same data the employee entered in the announcement later serves for hours accounting and for the schedule.

Capacity: three states instead of a spreadsheet

Planning in UnitLook is done by dragging a request onto a calendar cell. That creates a block for that person, at that time, linked to the request. Every day carries one of three states:

• capacity fine,
• close to maximum capacity,
• daily capacity exceeded.

For an overrun it shows how many hours are in the day, and the color in the calendar follows the state. Overload is visible before the week is closed, not at the end when it is too late to change anything.

Daily capacity is eight hours by default and can be adjusted per person. On a day when a person is absent, or part of the day is outside the office, capacity is not a full working day, so the system warns earlier.

A weekly routine that works

Here is a simple routine we recommend to managers:

1. Friday or Monday: review who is away. For each day of the coming week open the overview of absent people and see who is missing.
2. Approve what is waiting. An announcement that is pending does not count toward capacity, so the schedule may be wrong.
3. Schedule the requests. Drag them onto days and people, watching the capacity color.
4. Fix the overruns. Whatever is red, move to another day or another person.
5. At the end of the week compare. The plan is intent, the time log is what actually happened. The difference is the most useful input for the next plan.

It is worth remembering that a plan is not a time log. Moving a block does not enter hours into billing. Hours are written separately, on the request or in the time entry screen. The system does not allow planning for a past date, so a plan cannot be adjusted afterwards to match what already happened.

If you want it all together

Absences, planning and time tracking are most useful when they work as one loop: announcement, plan, work and comparison. We wrote about that in planned versus actual, and about the module itself in team capacity planning. If you are just starting, begin with your first week in UnitLook.

More about the features on the pages leave management and capacity planning.

FAQ

Who approves absences?

The manager or a person who has been given that right. Approval is done on a separate tab, with the option of a note when approving or rejecting.

Can an absence be announced for just a few hours?

For a business trip and working outside the office, yes. For those a date and time are entered, in 15-minute steps.

Does a pending absence count toward capacity?

No. Only an approved absence enters capacity and the monthly overview, which is why announcements should be approved on time.

Can employees announce their own absences?

They can, if they are allowed to. An employee who may only announce for themselves sees a shorter list of employees in the form.

If you would like to see how absences and the schedule connect in your case, get in touch for a demo at unitlook.com. It takes 45 minutes and needs no preparation.