As we approach the half year point small businesses, should now ensure that annual leave is being used by employees and there isn’t a scenario where all your staff have lots of annual leave to take at the end of the year.

Check the number of annual leave days remaining for your teams and if they still have a high balance encourage them to plan and take the leave. Remind them that holidays are good for their wellbeing as they allow them to rest and recharge, send them an email confirming how much leave they have remaining and ask them to plan in their holidays for the remainder of the year.

Here are some things to consider over the coming months.

Delays!

Its widely publicised that people are facing delays and cancellations at airports, as the travel sector recovers after the pandemic.

What do you do in the situation where an employee is delayed and does not return from annual leave as expected?

You would hope that the employee notifies you of the delay as soon as possible.  Is this something that is covered in your existing annual leave procedure, or do you need to consider communicating this out to employees?

In this situation, once the employee has returned from holiday, provided that have notified you of the delay there is a few options to consider:

• The employee could take additional annual leave to cover the period
• The employer could offer discretionary paid or unpaid leave
• The employer could give the employee the option to borrow annual leave from the following year
• The employer could offer the employee the opportunity to make up the time at a later date
• The employer could consider if there is a possibility for the employee to work remotely

Requesting leave

Holidays can be very emotive and potentially create disputes in smaller businesses when staff all want the same period off.

Do you ask employees to give sufficient notice when requesting holidays? By setting this, employers can accommodate more requests and plan for cover. This will also minimise any potential tensions between employees.

Did you know that an employee who wishes to take annual leave must give notice equal to twice the length of the holiday they wish to take?

Carry over

We have had two years of being able to carry over more than holidays than ever, thanks to the emergency legislation that came in force on 26 March 2020, which allowed workers to carry over up to four weeks annual leave into the next two holiday years. At the end of this year that legislation expires, and employee will then only be able to carry over holiday in excess of the statutory annual leave period. Therefore, as a minimum they need to take four weeks holiday and any remaining holiday above this can be carried over, if the business wishes to allow carry over.

If you want to provide the option of allowing employees to carry over holidays, you will need to consider providing guidance to employees covering:

• if carry over would be automatic if not used or if this needs to be requested and approved
• the maximum number of days allowed to be carried over
• whether those carry over days need to be used by a set period

Do you have an annual leave procedure in place to cover some of the issues above? Do you need a form to capture carry over requests for your employees? If you need any guidance or support with any issues mentioned above, please get in touch.