For many, the holidays are considered one of the busiest times of the year. Your already busy life doesn’t suddenly stop because the end of the year approaches. It’s like something else is added on top of it all – something that is a massive time commitment, no less.
Managing schedules, attending events, and making endless time-off requests can make the workplace—and the new year —hectic. Everyone tries to meet last-minute deadlines and ensure they’re leaving themselves in a position to hit the ground running.
Making this time as easy as possible for everyone often involves collecting—and acting on—a massive amount of data. In years past, that data was collected in various paper forms. Consider how many paper time-off requests your average HR department would have to process in the run-up to the end of November, for example.
Thankfully, holiday planning at work is one of the many things that can be streamlined these days with technology and resources like a digital form solution. It’s easier than ever to help teams stay organized and productive during the busy holiday season.
Digital Forms Require Less Effort (and Oversight)
In an overarching sense, a digital form will be useful in many ways, including making it easy to collect information.
When you use the right digital form creation tool, you can set everything up and fully customize it to your needs. For example, if you were trying to gather and track employee availability, you might ask a series of basic questions in a standard format. You could then quickly distribute that digital form to workers, which they would fill out and submit just as easily. Suddenly, you have all the information you need to have a “bird’s eye view” of holiday season availability in a fraction of the amount of time and effort that it used to take.
Most importantly, you can also see who has filled out the form and who has yet to do so, allowing you to follow up as needed. If we still lived in a world driven by paper-based forms, you would hand out those availability forms and essentially hope for the best. Some people might fill out the information in a different format, making it hard to see what you have until it’s too late. Others might request an additional copy of the form by accident and fill out both. Or, you could lose one or more of the forms after they’ve already been turned in without realizing it. The total number of potential problems that you could encounter is enormous.
None of this is an issue with a digital form solution, however. You request information, and someone responds by filling in the blanks. You can immediately begin to work from it – it truly is that simple.
Streamlined Event Planning
It’s easy to see how this can extend to other areas of your holiday season operations, too. Naturally, you’ll probably throw a holiday party or other seasonal gathering. You can use digital forms to distribute and track party RSVPs, getting a headcount in real-time.
Many companies incorporate digital forms to create sign-ups for slots for employee potlucks or to vote on a group Christmas activity. All the data collected can be organized and easily viewed to let the event organizer know exactly how much food will need to be purchased or what other steps are needed to prepare.
Availability Calendars Are Easily Maintained
Another way that digital forms can help simplify workplace holiday planning is by incorporating them with shared calendars. Most digital form solutions offer integrations with web calendars. These types of integrations make it possible to both collect the data and simultaneously distribute it to the people who need it the most.
To continue with the availability example, say you’ve begun to gather employee availability for the remainder of November and December. Instead of relying on employees to (maybe) include the information you need by asking them to perform a calendar entry manually, a form can be structured with the required fields to collect the data as you need it. Collecting data this way also allows you to see who has and hasn’t responded. You could overlay this information against any seasonal fluctuations that you expect to have, allowing you to guarantee that you have the workforce needed to meet anything life throws at you.
From the point of view of an employee, they don’t have to go around wondering whether they can take a specific day off at the end of December. They can look at the calendar, see that there is more than enough coverage, and put in their request.
Gift Exchanges Just Got More Organized
With digital forms, you can collect information about your employees to help aid in your employee gift-giving process. Asking employees to provide first-hand information about their preferences and hobbies can help make gift-giving a much more enjoyable experience.
If gifts aren’t in the plans, digital forms can easily collect employee address information to send Christmas cards. With mail merge technology, that data can be exported and printed on envelopes or sticky labels to reduce the time it takes to distribute them. Again, the convenience is that all of this information is in one place and can be exported to use in whatever way is most useful.
A New Approach to Holiday Planning
Taken together, even something like a digital form is much more sophisticated than it initially seems. It’s a way to simplify workflows. It’s an opportunity to establish clear deadlines that keep things moving, regardless of how busy the office gets. It’s also a way to reduce manual paperwork that was a massive burden for everyone involved.
But the beauty is that with these technological resources, holiday planning doesn’t just get easier this year. This year establishes a baseline to build upon, refine, and continue to improve.
The result is that all the important work still gets done, and teams can enjoy the festivities without compromising productivity. That’s an exciting position to be in, regardless of the size of your team.
