With just less than a year left to The London Olympics, now is the best time for employers to start planning manpower over that period.

Recruitment consultants, Badenoch and Clark conducted a research to find out how many organisations are ready to cope with Olympics-related employees’ absence. The research has shown that only 21.1% of employers have already taken steps to establish a London 2012 leave policy.

While Ed Cotton, a partner at law firm Irwin Mitchell, proposes a flexible working option, giving employees the chance to swap shifts in order to attend/watch the desired Olympic events there are also other, longer-term solutions available.

Introducing an automated holiday planning system could be a step towards better management of your workforce.

The system gives your staff the option to check their accrued, planned and taken leave as often as required, as well as request holidays without having to speak to their managers and filling in unnecessary forms. If a request is submitted, a manager receives an email notification to deal with it.

This way of managing holidays saves your employees and managers time and the resources needed in the past to complete a paper-based request.

With an event like the Olympics, a supervisor could set up leave slots. This option restricts the number of people which would be allowed to take holiday on the same day. When trying to book a holiday on a day when already for example 3 other people have planned to be on leave, an employee would get a rejection message and would have to change or abandon their request.

In addition, your department managers, while on leave, could ‘escalate’ their responsibilities regarding approving/declining holiday requests to supervisors so that any holiday-related issues are sorted without delays.

Having an automated holiday planning system would also help your company to avoid any overpayments made as a consequence of wrongly calculated holiday entitlements and save your HR managers a bulk of administration time.

There are many holiday planning software systems available on the market. The best solution would be to consider a system which would not only handle your employees’ entitlements but also monitor their absence through clocking in machines and provide you with valuable nformation on their unplanned absences such as ‘sickies’. When the survey shows that one in six of respondents admitted that they would consider taking a ‘sickie’ to watch London 2012, a time and attendance system is an option worth considering.

To find out more on what to consider when choosing a time and attendance system download our guide now by clicking here.