Objective
The objective of this tutorial is to help you understand how to approve and decline employees’ submitted unavailability requests in the Week View of the Availability module.
Overview
Access from your: Desktop
Applies to: Managers, Supervisors, and Schedulers
To ensure adequate coverage, only users with scheduling permissions can approve or decline unavailability requests.
Things to know before you begin:
You must have Manager/Admin, Supervisor, or Scheduler access privileges to access the Unavailability Requests/List view.
To review employees’ unavailability requests, enable the “Availability must be approved by management” setting. Otherwise, employees’ unavailability requests will be automatically approved once submitted.
If you would like to allow Schedulers to approve employees’ requests, enable the “Allow Schedulers to approve availability” setting.
You’ll find the unavailability requests from all employees that you manage in the “Unavailability Requests” section. The status of each request is visually indicated: approved requests come with the green ”Approved” status, declined requests with the red “Declined” status, and pending requests with the yellow “Pending” status. Approved and Declined requests are in read-only mode.
Only pending requests can be approved or declined. You can’t change the status of the already declined/approved requests.
Requests for dates in the past cannot be approved.
You can navigate to different dates within the Week View by using the mini-calendar in the left filter bar.
Employees can be notified via email, SMS, or push notification once their requests are approved or declined.
The scenario outlined in this tutorial consists of the following building blocks:
Approving/Declining weekly unavailability requests
Approving/Declining repeating unavailability requests.
Approving/Declining individual unavailability requests
Approving/Declining weekly unavailability requests
Step 1: Go to Availability module from the top panel, as shown in Image 1.
Image 1
Step 2: In the Unavailability Requests section, you will land on the current week by default. Use the calendar arrows to navigate to the week of interest to review that week’s unavailability requests, as shown in Image 2.
Image 2
Note:
All assigned employees are displayed in the grid. Browse through the pages at the bottom of the screen to view their requests.
To view only weekly requests from employees who work at one of the locations that you manage (rather than at all locations), use the Filter by Location option on the left-side panel. By clicking on the checkbox next to the desired location, you will be filtering down the list of employees so that only requests from employees who work at that location will be shown. You can use the Position filter in a similar way, to view only employees that occupy a certain position.
To find a specific employee, use the Search box in the right-hand corner by typing that employee’s name.
Step 3: In order to approve all requests from a certain employee for a certain week, select that employee by clicking on the checkbox next to their name, as shown in Image 3.
Image 3
Note:
You can select only employees who have at least one pending request in the selected week.
You can select multiple employees at once.
To select all employees on the page, click on the master checkbox on the top of the grid.
The number of selected employees will be indicated within the Approve and Decline buttons.
Step 4a: To approve the selected employees’ weekly requests, click the Approve button and confirm with Ok, as shown in Image 4a.
Image 4a
Note: The status of all approved requests will be updated to Approved in the grid.
Step 4b: To decline the selected employee’s weekly requests, click the Decline button and confirm with Ok, as shown in Image 4b.
Image 4b
Note: The status of all declined requests will be updated to Declined in the grid.
Step 5: Enter a declining note, which will be sent to all selected employees whose requests were declined, and confirm with Ok, as shown in Image 5.
Image 5
Approving/Declining repeating unavailability requests.
Step 1: In order to approve or decline a series of repeating pending requests, click on the staff member’s name, as shown in Image 1.
Image 1
Step 2: Click on the pending request in the grid in order to open the Details card, as shown in Image 2.
Image 2
Step 3: Click on the Approve/Decline button to approve/decline the selected request. If you’re deleting a repeating slot, two options will be offered:
Decline This Request Only — to approve/decline only the selected slot
Decline the Entire Series — to approve/decline the selected slot and all future slots within that series
Confirm the action with OK, as shown in Image 3. The slots will then be approved/declined and, along with it, your employee’s availability will be changed.
Image 3
Approving/Declining individual unavailability requests
Step 1: In order to approve or decline a certain pending request, click on it in the grid in order to open the Details card, as shown in Image 1.
Image 1
Step 2: Click on the Approve/Decline button to approve/decline the selected request, as shown in Image 2.
Image 2
Note:
The details of the request are displayed in the Details card.
The status of all approved/declined requests will be updated to Approve/Decline in the grid.
A Note can be added for the staff member in case of unavailability request is declined as shown in the image 2b.
Image 2b
If you have any further queries, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at support@humanity.com.