Dealing with extended leave requests
July 28, 2008
I’ve had some requests recently for extended periods of leave. In particular this seems to be happening with those who are planning a wedding, either their own overseas wedding or one for a close family member who lives on the other side of the world. As with most organisations, the maximum period of annual leave an employee can take in my organisation is two weeks, which can be extended at management discretion. Allowing longer periods of annual leave can cause difficulties for organisations when trying to cover the workload of the employee, especially when they work in a small team, or even worse, if they are the only employee that carries out a certain role. However there is also the desire to be able to accommodate employees’ wishes in terms of their aspirations and lifestyle outside of work, and an employer offering this kind of flexibility is more likely to gain the sort of loyalty and commitment needed from employees if they are to succeed and excel as a business.
There are considerations when approached with a request for extended leave that go beyond the obvious workload issues. If the employee is allowed to use their annual leave entitlement for the period of leave, how many days will they have left when they return? The links to work-related stress, which may lead to increased sickness absence, need to be considered. A very long period without a break once the employee returns from extended leave, or beforehand if they are saving holidays up, is likely to put a lot of pressure on them, and they are also more likely to under-perform.
Additionally, the accrual of holidays needs to be considered. A long-standing employee may be allowed to use a lot of annual leave days that have yet to be accrued on their extended leave, but what happens when, as in my case, the employee is still in their probationary period or first year of service? The way I have managed this is to let the employee take all the days he has accrued up to the point of the leave as paid holiday, and the rest unpaid. This also means that when he returns he will still have an appropriate number of annual leave days to take before the next holiday year. This will mean he has more time off overall, but I feel this is a fair option that also looks after the health and safety issue.
This can be a tricky situation to handle, especially as it’s difficult not to set a precedent that may be problematic to uphold next time there’s a similar request. For certain situations, such as a marriage, you always want to accommodate the employee as much as possible. I think the best thing to do is that each time a request is granted or refused, the reasons are documented and kept on file so that if there is a complaint or query, the employer is able to show that they were fair and reasonable when dealing with all requests.
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