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Well-rested employees are more productive. By allowing more time to be spent with family, significant others, and close friends, vacations can help decrease stress, prevent burnout, and improve work-life balance. A recent research by EY found out that for every 40 hours of free time, an employee’s stay at the company increased by eight months.

However, most employees do not take enough vacations and do not use their paid vacation time. Leaving vacation time on the table is taking its toll on employees. A recent study by the World Health Organization (WHO) found that 745,000 people died in 2016 from heart disease and stroke due to long hours.

Take, for example, what happens when an employee accumulates years’ worth of unused vacation days. These get recorded as liabilities on the company’s balance sheet, and the corporate entity must be prepared to compensate the employee if they leave or retire. Unused vacations have cost U.S. businesses $224 billion a year, making them a financial liability for employers.

At the same time, no one profits from an ambiguous time-off policy — or a workplace culture that encourages workaholism. A person who takes a vacation now and then, on the other hand, is invigorated and more focused for an overall increase in productivity.

The urgency of “use it or lose it” vacation leave days explains why employees use the vacation days that they currently have — the policy offers no opportunity for uncertainty. On the other hand, employees tend to lean on the side of rarely taking vacation time when policies provide room for ambiguity, such as when vacation days are unrestricted and untracked.

The leaders of a company must ultimately set the tone for the company’s vacation policy. This policy includes ensuring that everyone takes their allowed vacation time and cultivating a culture that encourages them to use their vacation days.

This article will explore how Vacation Bidding process aids in distributing vacation time fairly and transparently which encourages employees to use their time offs. This becomes even bigger problem where employers need to adhere to union rules or other compliance bodies while optimizing employees experience and well-being.

How Vacation Bidding Helps

Vacation bidding process allows employees to choose and plan their preferred vacations quickly and easily. Employers can set the number of people who can take vacations during any given day of the year based on the seasonality and business needs. Employees can observe how other employees intend on taking their vacations making it easy to ensure too many employees are not taking the same time off. It also gives a fair and transparent way for employees to request the vacation time they desire.

Essentially, in a Vacation Bidding, all employees can request specific time periods off based on preference criteria. The preference criteria include specifics such as simply requesting a week off, requesting one of several weeks off, or requesting multiple weeks off in a row or a day off or multiple days off. Once each employee puts in their preferences for vacation time, the company can determine how they want to award requests based on a variety of criteria. They can prioritize employees based on position, seniority, length of employment, performance, reward points or other criteria established by the organization. Employees can bid for as many preferred vacation days/weeks as they want during the vacation bid process.

From here, the company allots a specific number of employees that can take vacation time on any given day/week. Of course, the number of employees can be adjusted for peak vacation times.

This process can be repeated on a chosen frequency by the company if they have the right tools to administer it. The frequency can be monthly, quarterly, annual or any other duration chosen by the company or the business unit.

How ShiftX Automates the Entire Vacation Bidding Process

Knowing what days or weeks are available to take vacation is one of the most difficult components of vacation bidding. Even more frustrating, when an employee’s rank order is low, the problem becomes exponential.

In this regard, ShiftX provides employees with a real-time view of their available vacation dates based on their accrued vacation and seniority ranking (as defined by the company), as well as bespoke union rules (where applicable)

Employees are free to submit as many requests as they want. Employees can also view all vacation weeks and days that the administrator has made available.

The user can define preferences for the vacation weeks they wish in the Preference Criteria Section. Preferences can get divided into three categories:

1. “I want this day/week” – The most straightforward method for requesting a day/week.
2. “I want one of these days/weeks” allows the user to choose one day/week from a set of  weeks.
3. “I want consecutive days/weeks” – This allows the user to get days/weeks in a row.

Furthermore, the preferences can be reordered and reviewed in sequence until all available weeks have gotten awarded.

After the initial allocation, the company will have choice to open it up to employees to request changes to their vacations during specified periods of time. They can specify the number of Change Periods and when they can occur. Employees might amend their vacation arrangements after the initial bid during change periods. Transferred and new employees can also choose their vacations during this period.

During a change period, employees can choose from days/weeks that the administration has added to accommodate new employees and weeks that other employees have exchanged.

In the end, it is up to each company to decide how many days off an employee will receive. But, with the right tool at your disposal, vacation distribution can be quite a breeze. With ShiftX, collaborate with your colleagues to figure out how to improve the as-is processes and map out the to-be processes at your organization.

Credit Ben Taylor on Flickr

I have never been a big fan of articles that try to group people by age. It feels about as credible as horoscopes; however research sometimes provides us with important insights about each generation. Gen-Z describes people born after 1995 (roughly). As Business Insider states, “Generation Z is the youngest, most ethnically-diverse, and largest generation in American history, comprising 27% of the US population.” This means Gen-Z will dominate the workforce, and we need to understand how to work with and provide great tools for them.

Gen-Z is passionate about inclusion;  49% identify as non-white. Gen-Z has never known a time without the internet but did live through the pre-IPhone era (before 2007) and pre-social media era (before 2004). They are comfortable with digital technology but surprisingly prefer face-to-face interaction. Gen-Z doesn’t need to be “always reachable” as much as millennials. They use their smartphones more than any other device for 15.4 hours a day. Gen-Z responds more to videos (YouTube is their favorite app) and images (Accenture). Gen-Z doesn’t have an attention problem; they have a highly trained eight-second filter.  As digital natives with innumerable information streams coming at them, they had to develop a fine-tuned filter.

What does Gen-Z want from work? Their top three must-haves for a first job aren’t very surprising:

• 70% Health insurance
• 63% Competitive salaries
• 61% A boss they respect and trusts them

Their career priorities also aren’t very surprising:

• 89% Stable career path
• 87% Competitive Salary and benefits
• 84% Work-Life balance

However, their intolerance for certain work practices is very surprising. There are some things Gen Z won’t tolerate from employers:

• 35% Being forced to work when they don’t want to
• 34% Inability to use vacation days when they want to
• 30% Back-to-back shifts

To summarize, Gen-Z wants work flexibility, prefer smartphones for digital interaction, demand quick interaction, have a keen sense of equality, and demand trust. ShiftX provides smartphone delivered, self-service, work flexibility tools that provide the transparency and trust Gen-Z requires to manage their schedules.

ShiftX Smart Scheduling Platform

Credit: ShiftX

Shift and vacation bidding allows employees to have more choice and transparency in their schedules.  Self-Service Shift Swapping and the ability to express Overtime availability give employees more trust and say in their schedules. Employees can clock in/out, request absences, and check in/out equipment all from their smartphones. To learn more about ShiftX visit https://shiftx.ai.

Hi there, I’m Amanda. I am a Lead Quality Assurance Analyst and multiple hat wearer (depending on operational needs) at ShiftX. I’m a happy part of this cutting edge & fun startup, ShiftX, which is led by some of the smartest, and most talented innovative minds in the tech industry.

My career, interestingly, has come full circle. How so? Back in my early 20’s, I was hired to be an America West Airlines reservations call center sales agent. It was one of the most demanding jobs I’ve ever had (if you’ve ever worked on the phones, I’m sure you can relate). However, this experience set the direction of my career (who’d-a-thunk-it).

Through the difficulties and challenges this job presented, I am forever grateful for the experience. You might be wondering how this has any relevance to today. Well, a particular pain point regarding the scheduling process, that not just reservations agents experienced, but also customer service & gate agents and many others with rotating schedules or shifts, was that it was 100% MANUAL. It was a manual process for both the Admins creating/assigning the schedules, as well as the agents who bid on the schedules.

I recall this process being one of the most stressful occasions. Admins would type out hundreds of schedule lines with various shifts and days off, then print and staple thousands of these papers. Once we as agents got our hands on these pages filled with shifts, we’d study them and carefully make our selections. We would go around asking our peers (the folks that had higher seniority than ourselves) what their likely selection would be so that we can attempt to figure out what shifts would potentially be available to us. We would be assigned a bidding day and time, and we would go to a conference room where the admins would be sitting behind some tables with the schedules printed out in front of them. These schedules would be all marked up with the assignments of all the previous agents who bid before me. I’d go in, see what lines were available, and make a selection based on whatever shifts that were remaining. There were occasions when I was on a long call with a customer and would be late to make my shift bid selection. Oh, the agony! I knew that lower seniority agents were getting the opportunity to get the shifts for which I planned so carefully. It was a reality that I’m certain all agents have experienced at one point or another.

Fast forward a lot of years later; I am now part of a team that solves that very issue and more. ShiftX does the scheduling without any of the chaos. What does that mean? We are focused on the airline industry. Our goal is to make the scheduling process easy, save time and improve employee satisfaction. So that means taking the entirely manual process and automating it. Admins will no longer spend countless hours creating shifts and assigning them. Agents will no longer need to spend days studying several pages or tap on shoulders asking others what they will bid. The best part is not missing or being late to make your scheduled bid selection because of a long customer call. Agents now can prioritize their schedule bid line preferences ahead of time. So, if the agent is unable to make their live bidding window, no problem! The system auto-assigns in order of seniority and by the agent’s preferences. What a huge relief!

I’ve lived through the trials and pains of being an agent, which has ultimately brought me to a team solving the problems of past Amanda. I get to be part of the solution in removing those problems of old. When I reflect on my time as an airline agent, I feel so fortunate and grateful for the foundation and education that it has given me. At ShiftX, I contribute to solving the scheduling problem for my old co-workers and all airline employees. For me, this is truly an exciting time!