Personio allows employees to register their working hours or to request time off at any time, including periods when their main approver (usually their supervisor) is, for example, on paid vacation or sick leave. These requests often require immediate attention and cannot wait for the supervisor to be back.

There are two ways of ensuring that all approval requests are looked after:

Enable the Delegate approvals option

You can enable the Delegate approvals settings option for supervisors to automatically take over their direct report's approval responsibilities (for both absence and attendance) while the reports are absent.

You will be able to use the approval delegation feature as long as you:

• are actively tracking your employees' absences in Personio
• are actively tracking your employees' working time in Personio
• previously set up approval workflows through Settings > Workflows > Approvals

Follow these steps to ensure that the approver's supervisor receives the approval requests:

1. Navigate to Settings > Approvals > [Absence type/ Attendance]  and go to the Delegate approvals section.
   
2. Tick the Enable Delegation checkbox.
3. Click Save.
4. The approvers' supervisors will then be notified about any new approval requests via both the Time Tracking overview page and their Inbox, and will be able to either confirm them or reject them. The delegated approval requests will only be displayed during the approver's absence. As soon as the approver is back, any unanswered delegated approval requests will disappear.

   Note
   If the approver is currenlty absent due to remote work (has requested an absence type with the "Remote work" absence category), the approver's supervisors will not receive any approval requests. This type of absence is excluded from the Delegate approvals option.

Manually approve requests as an administrator

As an administrator, you can access an overview of all open approval requests, and process these requests from the Workflow Hub. For example, you can act as an approver when a supervisor is absent or on leave. This not only applies to the administrator, but to any employee with editing rights to Attendance data or Absences.

Note
This workaround should only be used for urgent cases to prevent the disruption of internal team workflows, arrangements, and responsibilities.

Approval Requests

Approval requests that are pending for less than seven days display as an on track approval, and approval requests that are pending for more than seven days display as an overdue approval in the Approval requests widget.

Follow these steps to manually approve requests:

• Navigate to Workflow Hub > Approval requests.
• To view all open (on track and overdue) approval requests and see who is responsible for each approval request, click on View all approvals.
• On the Open Approval Requests page, click on the name of the employee who is responsible for approving the request listed under the To be approved by column.
• You will be taken to the Profile of the relevant employee. Click on Log in as this employee and approve the request manually.

For more information about the Workflow Hub and the Workflow Dashboard widget, read this Help Center article on the Workflow Hub in Personio.