Handling holiday requests can become a task dreaded by the management team and can be especially challenging around those all-important events in the calendar. Christmas, school holidays and religious festivals can particularly cause pressure points for the smooth running of a business causing loss of productivity.
Here’s a few tips to help manage the process:
Policy – To enable the management of your holiday requests to be handled in a fair manner without raising disputes amongst the workforce it is important to deliver a clear and concise policy that can be easily accessed setting out how your holiday entitlement is calculated and how requests will be considered. Ensure holiday calculations are clear to understand so that you create transparency amongst your employees.
Entitlement – Employees are entitled to a minimum of 20 days annual leave plus 8 statutory days holiday making a total of 28 days per year. Many companies offer above this minimum entitlement as a way of attracting and retaining staff. Some companies offer an enhancement to entitlement as a reward based on length of service. The ability to buy additional holiday at the beginning of the holiday year is another way of creating flexibility and fairness giving employees the choice to increase their holiday throughout the year.
Process – Ensure a clear process for signing off holiday requests is firmly in place and is communicated to everyone involved. Your sign off process should be handled by those running the day to day departments together with the departmental head who can look at the overall picture.
By using HR analytics, you can measure the resource requirements needed to ensure staffing levels are maintained at optimum levels. This information can assist decision making and avoid unnecessary loss in production when considering holiday requests
Clover HR have a wealth of experience in the delivery of a robust absence management process, so please call us on 0121 516 0299 or email us at info@cloverhr.co.uk for further advice and support.
