The Event Calendar on your intranet is the ultimate organization tool when it comes to your company’s events. Due to the flexibility of this feature, there are several other unique ways an Event Calendar can be utilized that you may not be aware of. In talking to our customers, we discovered the most unique and innovative ways they are utilizing the Event Calendar, including:
1. Requesting Time Off
You can streamline vacation requests on your intranet by utilizing the Event Calendar. Moving vacation requests onto your intranet makes it easy to track which days employees are taking off in an organized calendar view, as well as eliminates any paper-based request process.
Using an Event Calendar for vacation requests also assists HR with managing employees’ time off. When an employee requests a day off, their request will be put into an automated approval process. HR will receive a notification of the request and from there they can approve or reject the request. As soon as it’s been approved, it will appear on the vacation calendar and the employee will receive a notification that their time off request has been accepted.
Not only does the Event Calendar display when everyone is taking time off in a central location, it saves employees time manually having to book time off as well as assists HR in managing vacation requests. Below is an example of what a vacation calendar looks like:
2. Displaying Due Dates
Another great way to utilize the Event Calendar is by turning it into a content or editorial calendar, displaying dates projects are set to launch and when they are due. This is useful for displaying items such as when the company newsletter goes out, the beginning and end of a quarter, the launch of a new product, and much more. To avoid cluttering up the editorial calendar with tons of different due dates, it is beneficial to have a different Event Calendar on each Department Site to display only items pertaining to that department.
Having all of these important due dates in a calendar view ensures everyone is familiar with the due dates of a project, as well as staying on schedule.
At Intranet Connections, our Marketing Team relies heavily on the Event Calendar as an editorial calendar to display different publish dates for various marketing initiatives. Below is an example of what it looks like:
3. Booking Conference Rooms
The Event Calendar can be used for more than just displaying important dates, you can also use it as a way to book conference rooms. You can simply set up a sub-category and color code for each conference room. Employees can then select the day they wish to use a conference room on the calendar view, then select their sub-category (or room). You can also set up a conflict check based on this so that if two employees try to book the same room at the same time, they will get a conflicting message.
To avoid this altogether, you can set up an automated approval stage, similar to the vacation calendar, where whenever employees request a room, an approval manager has to approve or reject it first.
The Event Calendar isn’t only limited to booking conference rooms, it can be set up to book any resource, such as the company iPad, company vehicle, training DVDs and more.
4. Organizing Corporate Events
Lastly, the Event Calendar is a great tool for organizing corporate events, such as company parties, team-building events, meetings, lunch and learns, and more. Employees can quickly and easily see all the event details in an easy-to-read calendar view.
You can also feed these events onto your intranet home page using an Application Feed Widget so that employees never forget the dates of upcoming events. A “view more” link will appear in the bottom right corner, allowing employees to click that to view the whole Event Calendar.
Engage with Event Calendars
The Event Calendar is a useful and robust tool. You can utilize it in many different ways, making it a must-have on your intranet. Are you currently using your Event Calendar in ways we didn’t mention? Let us know by commenting below.
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