What process do you follow when new public holidays are announced mid year?

[AdeBello]

Please can you share your experiences of what you do when impromptu  new public holidays are announced mid year. That is a new date to be added to the Holiday calendar and what you do about employees that have already booked the day off as leave.

In my company, the senior management usually announce wellbeing days during the year, but as they are not guaranteed, we do not know when those days will be so we can't add the dates to the holiday calendar at the beginning of the year. When the date is announced, we add it, but then find that there are employees that have already booked the day off. The last time this happened we really struggled and had to manually go through the employee records to update their time off and give the day back so it is not deducted from their leave balance. The alternative is that the employee cancel any leave booked on that date themselves, but management prefer that we do it on their behalf.

Any advice on the best way to deal with this will be most appreciated.

Thanks

[PetraRana · Accepted solution]

Hi AdeBello,

in my company we have 'spirit day' but actually we do not record it at all. It is announced few times a year and each employee can use the day in any way we wish. We actually assume that employees adjust their leave requests accordingly if needed.

In terms of ad hoc public holiday added mid-year, our support team would run TMRE recalculation after inserting additional public holiday. Hope that this helps.

Petra

[AdeBello · Accepted solution]

Thanks for sharing your process.

[AdeBello · Accepted solution]

It sounds like our companies do the same thing, but ours are called wellness days. Previously management told employee not to worry if they had days already booked that the HRIS team would sort it on their behalf. It caused us a lot of issues so the last one employees were told to cancel and leave they had booked by themselves. I would love a situation where we the HRIS team can do it on behalf of the employees, but we haven't quite figured out the process. We ran the TMRE recalculation after adding the wellness day to the holiday calendars to prevent any more EEs booking it off as holiday and on the whole the recalculation worked, but what I found when doing the audit is that anyone who had the actual date including in their leave booking the recalculation did not work for them. Especially EEs that only had that day booked, it was as if the system did not know what to do with them.

[Volker_Ruof]

Why don´t you trigger a recalculation? This recognizes public holiday calendar changes and revaluates already recorded absences.

Volker

[AdeBello]

Many thanks for your advice. I did that but when auditing leaves that employee's had booked, I found that any leave that fell on the exact date of the public holiday did not recalculate. Any further suggestions? Thanks in advance

[Volker_Ruof]

Hello Adebello,

what Petra mentioned is the solution:

Changes in the holiday calendar are considered with a TMRE recalculation.

It does of course not "delete" the absences already recorded on the day of the new public holiday, but it retriggers the absence counting and sets the absence days  / hours on the new public holiday to zero so that the employee does not get any vacation deduction or any other absence hours calculated on this new added public holiday.

Hope this helps.

Volker