As the school holiday period approaches, there tends to be a significant increase in questions around annual leave entitlements an employee has.
Having an existing policy in place assists in what you can and cant do in terms of an employees annual leave request. This can become particularly pertinent where an employer is extremely busy and does not want any one to take annual leave.
So the question often becomes “do I have to allow the employee take annual leave if it doesn’t suit my business?”
Having a written policy that covers this circumstance is the ideal situation. Generally an annual leave policy will suggest the request “shall not be unreasonable withheld’. However there can be some contention over the definition of “unreasonable”.
This is why we strongly recommend you utilise HR Central to ensure your policy is clear. This allows you to deal with situations such as requesting staff to take leave while the office shuts down over Christmas or busy times where you don’t want anyone to take leave. The clearer the policy, the easier it will be to implement and manage.