Most people think of annual leave as a simple thing: book it, take it, done. For managers though it can be a minefield. Staffing levels and core tasks need to be balanced against the needs and rights of individual employees. Very quickly the rules your organisation needs to manage annual leave can become complicated. So what are some of the common complications, and how can you handle them?
Maintaining Minimum Numbers
Probably the most common complication is the need to make sure that roles are filled across a team. This need ranges from the simple – if two people do a role and cover each other’s absences, then only one can be off at any given time – to the more complicated, where a certain number of sales staff need to be working to have any hope of achieving the needed volume of sales. Often there can be contractual elements to this, where for example an outsourcer promises their client certain minimum staffing levels.
With LeaveWizard there is a simple solution to this issue. By sorting your employees into custom teams, monitoring leave patterns becomes easy. You can also set up custom rules, limiting the number of simultaneous holidays within any given team. This customised approach means that your rules are automatically applied during both the application and approval processes, giving you peace of mind.
Public Holidays and Lieu Days
The rules surrounding public holidays cause headaches for many organisations. Questions will arise as to whether these days are included in annual leave entitlement or separate. When employees are required to work on these days, they may be entitled to a day off to make up for it, known as a lieu day. The change this makes to annual leave entitlement could leave managers and employees unsure as to where they stand. LeaveWizard allows you to set up Lieu days, either adding them to the employee’s allowance, or keeping them as a separate category of leave, offering clarity to workers and control for managers.
When public holidays are counted separately from holiday entitlement, employees will often want to book time off around a public holiday, for example taking the whole week around Christmas. When this happens the public holiday needs to be treated differently than the other days. LeaveWizard users can either select from global public holiday calendars, or enter their own dates, which will then be automatically discounted from holiday time taken, removing the paperwork.
Global Trading
One of the more obvious complications for managing annual leave is the difficulty created when you trade across borders. Each country sets its own rules on annual leave entitlements, public holidays, and working hours. Even within a single country, there can be differences, for example, there is some variation in public holidays between England and Scotland within the UK, or between the states of a federal country such as the USA or Germany. LeaveWizard supports companies that trade globally, with no limit to the number of territories you can select. This lets you make sure that the correct rule sets are used for each employee so that they get their entitlements and public holiday allowances.
These are just a few of the more common issues that arise for organisations as they manage their annual leave. If you’re having a particular headache, you can check out our Knowledge Base to find easy to follow advice, or if you prefer contact our support team to talk about the solution for your complication. Book a free 30 min demo
