Shift working can throw a spanner into the works of managing holidays and absences at your company. Calculations of hours to be paid as holiday pay, or remaining allowance, may be simple enough for a fixed working pattern, but when hours may vary week-to-week, averaging over a longer period, they become more complex. Shift patterns can also make it harder to see patterns of absence, or to check that minimum staffing levels are maintained, adding to the headache. Here are some of the ways LeaveWizard makes it easier.
Customise Your Teams’ Working Patterns
At most companies that use shift work, employees will still work a regular pattern of hours, such as a week of early shifts followed by a week of late, or a pattern of days on and off to produce a 7-day work pattern. If this is the case for your company, then it is simple within LeaveWizard to create a custom work pattern to include these shifts.
We have several templates available to use, covering some common patterns, or if yours isn’t among those, they can simply be edited and saved, after which they will be available to you during employee set-up. You can set templates to be the default at various levels from company-wide down to individual sites and teams. This means that you can easily have for example your Head Office staff default to a Monday to Friday 9-5 routine, while factory staff works a two-week schedule of early and late shifts.
Include or Exclude Public Holidays
Shift work is often used to create a seven-day-a-week service. When this happens, staff may be expected to work on any public holidays that fall on their working days. Other shift workers will still be entitled to public holidays off. Whichever approach you take, setting it up in LeaveWizard is simple.
All you have to do is to select “Ignore public holidays” if the employee usually has to work on public holidays. With this option selected public holidays not worked will be taken from the worker’s allowance, without it the day off will not count towards their entitlement. Once again this can be set as a default for a team, location, or the whole company.
Book Leave in Days or Hours
Sometimes shifts are of uneven lengths. This is especially common in retail environments, where staff may be needed to work 10 hours on one day and only six on another. When your company works in this way it can be tricky to make sure employees get the right amount of leave – after all, it would be unfair to count a shorter day off as a full day’s leave.
With LeaveWizard a simple alternative is available. For each employee or group of employees, you can easily choose to count holiday entitlements and leave taken in either days or hours. With “hours” selected the employee will only have the hours, they would have worked taken from their allowance.
This is just a brief look at some of the issues that arise with shift workers. If you have questions about setting up shift patterns in LeaveWizard, you can check out the Knowledge Base, or contact our support team who will be happy to help you out.
