Vacation Request Form

A vacation request form is a formal piece of document that is used and filled by employees at an organization to request for an official work leave. Vacations are essential to keep our mental health in check and to help us unwind and bring our productivity back to work. To take a vacation from work, a few companies have a set of rules and protocols to follow. To make it easy for the employees, they are often provided with a vacation request form to fill and apply for a leave from work. This enables the employers to acknowledge their absence from work and make necessary changes in advance if needed. It also enables the human resource management to reschedule the tasks assigned and timings for other employees, right in time. Moreover, a vacation request form also comes in handy while drafting the salaries for the employees.

Constituents of a Vacation Request Form

A basic template of a vacation request form contains following,

• Name of the person requesting for leave.

• Their current designation in the company and name of the department.

• The date from which they need to leave for the vacation.

• The date when they would be joining back.

• The date when the request for vacation leave was made because normally it is submitted in advance as per company’s policy.

• A section for the signatures of both the employee and the employer.

• A section where the employee can add additional comments to explain their reason for requesting to take a leave.

• A section where the employer can add their comments in case they deny or approve.

Most importantly, a vacation request form must clearly state the name of the form in the title. Additions and subtractions to the basic template can be made as per the company’s needs and requirements. There are a number of templates available online, you can simply download them and customize accordingly.

Implementation of a Vacation Request Form

Every company has a set policy for employees if they wish to request for vacations. Being part of compulsory leave management, every organization must ensure the basic right of every employee to avail a certain number of leaves for vacation every year. As a matter of fact, this should be the preliminary duty of the manager to let the employees aware of this policy. A few companies have also made this compulsory to submit the leave application a certain amount of time prior to the actual date from when the vacation leave is requested. These terms and policies are usually printed on the vacation request form for convenience. Since it is a vacation request form and is not used for emergency leave situations, therefore it is typically made compulsory for the employees to fill it beforehand and submit to the HR department for review and approval. It is always wise to strategically plan vacation leaves for employees in advance to keep enough manpower at the office even if someone requests for the vacation leave.

Benefits of a Vacation Request Form

Using a vacation request form to ask for vacation leaves has proven to be beneficial for both the employers and the employees. These benefits are countless, but few of them are given below for your ease;

1- It enables the employers to have a written record of who gets to request for vacations frequently and who actually deserves to be granted permission.

2- A vacation request form also makes it evident that a certain employee would not be available during certain dates and the management needs to distribute the work load among the rest fairly.

3- Submitting a form to request for the vacation leave makes the whole process formal and if the employer is to deny the request, they will also need to give the reason for denying the request, either verbally or in written words.

4- Since it is being documented, the reason for denial must always be a logical and a convincing one. Furthermore, in case of denial, the employee must understand the intent of the person in charge of denying the request.

5- It must be made sure that the employees requesting for vacation leaves are filling the vacation request form in order to ask for the approval and inform them officially.

6- These vacation request form are usually kept in the employee’s record files. This gives an account of the number of times an employee applies for the leave.