Staff PTO Tracker

I worked with the People and Culture department to look at their current system - PTO requests in the form of emails, and a spreadsheet updated on a weekly basis with everyone’s total amounts. This worked when the team was fewer than 10 people and mostly in the same location. Now that the organization was more than 20 and in several different countries, it was becoming unwieldy.

• The organization was already using Airtable for the Operations, so it was an easy to identify solution: a hub that tracked employee data, PTO allocations and other benefits by country, incoming requests, approvals, and balances.

• This system was incredibly complex (and fun) to build. It required use of all of Airtable’s most complex tools including roll-ups, formulas, and pivot tables to note starting PTO, used PTO, requested PTO, and current balance.

• Once the calculations were completed and working correctly, I build an interface for staff, supervisors, and HR to interact with the data in different ways.

  • The staff portal allowed every staff member to view their own information, including their annual allocations, PTO requests they’ve submitted, and how much PTO remained.

  • The supervisor portal allowed supervisors to view staff PTO requests that required their review and approval, and a calendar for their team.

  • The HR/Executive portal included data for all staff, with a visual dashboard that represented how many PTO hours remained unused in the organization, and noticed for those staff who had an excess of PTO remaining unused.
    

• Automations were the last piece built, which included the creation of new annual records that calculated and carried over PTO from the previous year, reminder emails for supervisors that PTO requests were pending, and a monthly summary email for the HR directors and Executive office with a summary of who would be out of the office that month.

The system was tested first by the People and Culture team, who put it through its paces by submitting requests, rejecting and canceling requests, processing data on the back-end, and triggering the automations. They found a few issues that were quickly rectified, including a broken automation chain, an incorrect formula calculation, and a typo in the automated emails - proving the need for testing these systems!

• In this case, it was important to build the documentation directly into the interface, in the form of a landing page. This included links to the organization’s PTO policies, instructions on using the different components of the platform, who to contact for support, and workflow visuals to understand how requests move through the organization.