Now, is a great time to review and check your leave liability for all your people. We have been working with clients since lock-down, helping them update some of their most basic policies and guidelines including managing leave.
Here are some quick tips:
- Initiate discussions with people with high leave – generally anyone with leave over 20 days.
- You need to give them 2 weeks’ notice to take their leave and it must be agreed when and how they will take their leave
- Look ahead to Christmas and New Year shutdowns as a good opportunity to ask your people with high leave to take more time off over this period to reduce their leave.
- Your employees can cash out leave up to 5 days per year as an option to reduce their leave.
From a business perspective, if you aren’t managing your high leave balance effectively, this accumulates on your balance sheet and when an employee leaves, you have to pay out their leave entitlement, which can have an impact on cash flow.
Also, from a health and wellbeing perspective, you want to ensure that your people are taking leave throughout the year, so do keep this in mind when it comes to managing leave.