For many organizations, time off bidding is more likely to evoke spreadsheets, stress, and scheduling chaos. Rather than palm trees and beach dreams. Supervisors are often buried in manual processes, juggling paper forms, Excel sheets, and endless back-and-forth emails while employees are left waiting, unsure if or even when their vacation picks will be approved.
In many cases, the time off bidding process drags into the new year, giving workers little time to plan their paid time off. So, how can employers make the most of the time they spend on time off bidding? It starts with a few key process improvements that make a big impact.
1. Digitize Time Off Bidding
Step away from the three-ring binder. A centralized cloud-based platform makes it easier to collect, track, and manage vacation requests in one place. It also creates a single source of truth. Every decision, approval, and denial is documented and accessible. That means that employees and supervisors alike can review the time off bidding process with confidence, knowing that nothing will get lost in a stack of paper or stay buried in an email thread.
2. Automate Rule Enforcement
Whether it’s seniority, union rules, or blackout dates. Automating these rules in your time off bidding process reduces errors, speeds up approvals, and ensures fairness. One of my manufacturing customers used to dedicate a full workday to manually reviewing paper requests for just one department. With Indeavor’s automatic time off approval engine, they now complete the process in just 10 to 20 minutes. That’s a big save on value-added time for management.
3. Increase Transparency
Cut down on employee admin back and forth. Give employees real-time visibility into their leave balances, leave eligibility, and bidding status as they submit vacation picks. Indeavor empowers employees to plan with confidence by blocking out dates where PTO quotas have already been filled. Providing real-time balance updates throughout the time off bidding process and by notifying employees via email and in-app notifications when their picks have been approved. And because our system is cloud-based, employees can submit selections from anywhere they have internet access, whether that’s at home or at work.
4. Accelerate Timelines
Vacation calendars can be finalized before the new year. Before switching to Indeavor, one of my government customers frequently ran their time off bidding process into February due to the sheer volume of manual work it took to process paper requests. Now they finish by November, giving everyone more breathing room before the busy holiday season.
At Indeavor, we’ve helped employers around the world implement these changes, and the results speak for themselves: faster planning cycles, fewer disputes, and happier teams. So if vacation planning still feels like a fire drill at your site. It might be time to rethink the process because when you get it right, everyone wins.