Blackout calendars

Using this feature, you can define blackout dates to prevent employees from submitting time off requests during certain blackout periods. For example, retail traffic greatly increases from the day after Thanksgiving through to the New Year. You may not want to permit employees to request scheduled time off during Thanksgiving weekend or other defined periods.

You can also define grayout dates, where time off requests are permitted by the system but are discouraged by the business. For example, you may want to discourage employees to request scheduled time off during certain holidays.

This feature supports calendar inheritance. By default, child teams automatically inherit the blackout calendars that are defined by their parent teams. With inheritance, teams do not have to redefine blackout or grayout dates that have already been defined further up in the hierarchy. Teams can elect to define their own blackout and grayout dates or redefine inherited blackout dates as grayout dates, or vice versa. Teams can also ignore inherited blackout or grayout dates by "white-listing" them.

For example, the corporate team defines Thanksgiving weekend (November 26, 2015 to November 29, 2015) as blackout dates. A child team, New York Region, redefines November 28 to November 29 as grayout dates. In this example, employees belonging to the New York Region team would be prohibited from requesting time off from November 26 to November 27, but would be permitted to submit grayout requests from November 28 to November 29. Another child team, Canada, "white-lists" the US Thanksgiving weekend period entirely. Employees belonging to the Canada team would have no restrictions on their time off requests from November 26 to November 29.

When defining a time off type, you indicate whether that time off type is to be subject to the blackout day validation. For example, you may not want to allow employees to request vacation over a blackout period, but may want to allow them to submit sick requests.

See the Time Off Planner Guide.