Vacation taking right before leaving the company: what can you do?
Every HR manager has been through it: an employee wants to leave their job and wishes to take a vacation, using all the leave days they saved up. This often causes an acute problem at the office: there is no time to arrange a replacement, but the tasks of the person leaving do need to be taken care of. The following question may arise: are you obligated to let an employee take their leave?
Rights and obligations
Every employee has a right to take their leave and use all of it, if they please. In principle, you cannot simply reject a request for leave, whatever the situation. If there are no other agreements about this subject in the contract (which is different in every line of business, of course), or in an employee handbook, you cannot prevent an employee from taking their leave. Only in exceptional cases, you could be allowed to ask them to not take leave, on account of important economic concern.
In any case, it is important that leave which has not been used is paid out to the employee when a contract is ended.
Better safe than sorry
If an employee who is leaving does want to go on holiday immediately, there is probably nothing you can do, and you would be at a loss as to what to do. That is why it is best to prevent such situations from happening, in advance. You need to realize that the problem is usually caused by the fact that people save up their leave days, which is why they have a lot of leave left at the end of their contract.
‘Divide’ and ‘spread out’ are key words when speaking about leave days. Other than that, it is important that your managers are encouraged to speak to their employees about this topic; the responsibility lies partly with them, after all.
Suitable administration is indispensable when it comes to leave distribution and withdrawal. Having an overview of everyone’s leave days and being able to create clear reports makes it easier to have well-founded talks with your employees. This allows you to address these issues ahead of time. When your leave is coordinated efficiently and registered well, such ‘accumulation issues’ will never cause you actual problems!
Would you like to know more about the cloud-based leave registration system of Leavedays.com? Feel free to contact us!
