Part-time staff. Full-time staff. Casual staff. Staff on night shifts. And staff who work on commission. Having a varied workforce helps you run your business.
It can also make calculating vacation pay a real test for you.
Here’s how to make sure your staff get the right amount of vacation leave.
Write an annual leave policy
Tell your staff how vacation leave works in your business.
With a written vacation leave policy, both you and your staff know how to request time off. Make sure you cover:
- Exceptions to your policy during your business’s peak times, so there are enough staff over busier times like Christmas or during school holidays.
- Notice periods for example, one week’s notice for a day off.
- Limits to how many people can be off work at the same time.
Calculating vacation pay and working out days off
Different workers have different contracts and hours, so their vacation leave entitlement might not be the same. If you calculate your staff’s annual leave wrong, they won’t be happy.
That’s why you need to make sure your HR and payroll departments work together so staff aren’t underpaid when they take time off.
Encourage your staff to work hard & play hard
To get the best out of your staff, they need time to unwind and relax. So when they return to work, they’re ready to get back to business.
You don’t want your employees to think they can’t take time off because they’ve got too much work to do. Keep an eye on staff workloads, and see whether you need to share tasks around the team. They’ll be grateful for some well-deserved vacation time.
Encourage your employees to use their vacation leave before the end of the year, and outline whether they can carry any days over or they might risk losing them.
Absent staff still accrue annual leave
Your staff don’t need to be at work to accrue vacation leave. Employees who are on leave can still accrue vacation, including staff on:
- Long-term sickness leave
- Parental or dependent leave
- Maternity, paternity or shared parental leave
In cases where staff haven’t been at work and aren’t able to take their vacation leave, you should consider letting them carry over their unused vacation. If staff have been off work because of maternity leave or sick leave, not allowing them to carry over leave will be discriminatory.
Make annual leave entitlement easy
Maybe you want HR software that does the maths. BrightHR automatically calculates your employees’ vacation leave so you don’t have to. Check out BrightHR now.
BrightHR March 2019 Updates:
Scheduling is an integral managerial function. You need to consider employees that are available to work, whether all shifts are covered, avoid over and under scheduling. With BrightHR, administrators and managers can see a summary of their employees’ hours and breaks totals and days worked, on the schedule planning section. Also, the employees are notified of created schedules and any updates with automatically generated notifications to avoid any confusion.
