Advanced Settings within a Leave Policy
When building out your leave policies within HR Partner, you will notice a section for "Advanced Settings" towards the bottom of the screen:
After expanding this menu you will see the following options:
Restrict which employees this leave applies to?
Selecting "Yes" here allows you to select exactly which employees have access to this particular leave type. This can be done by selecting specific Locations, Employment Statuses, Positions, Genders or, if you need to be more specific, you may also use Tags:
If you restrict a policy at a later date, you will need to run a housekeeping routine to bring your new restrictions into force. To do this head to Setup > Tools > Advanced > Verify Leave Policy Permissions & Restrictions
Change default display settings
Selecting "Yes" here allows you to stipulate whether this leave policy can be seen by employees when requesting leave or viewing their calendar
Visibility
If a policy is hidden from an Employee's leave request screen, they would be unable to request leave against it themselves, however an Admin User would still be able record leave on their behalf. This might be useful if you would prefer Admin Users to log sick leave rather than have your employees request it for example.
The next options you have here are whether the policy is visible to Admin Users when they are viewing leave Balances, and whether approved requests against the policy are visible in Admin Calendars. The only time either of these are typically set to "hide" would be when a policy is no longer in use. In such cases, we advise that you hide rather than delete to prevent loss of historic data.
iCal
The last options refer to the iCal feed which is the data pushed to Outlook or Google Calendar if you have setup a calendar integration. This is particularly useful for those customers to add their iCal feed to a public or shared external calendar, as it allows you to keep any descriptions or comments on leave requests confidential where necessary.
Increase allowance based on years worked?
Selecting "Yes" here allows you to incrementally increase your employees' annual leave Allowance by a set amount every year. You can choose whether this should happen on a specific date or on their work anniversary:
Automatically approve leave requests?
Selecting "Yes" here means that leave requests submitted against this policy bypass the leave approval process you have built into your system. This is often used in policies that have been created with the sole purpose of allowing certain staff to make entries in a company-wide calendar. For example, senior management who perhaps don't need to request approval for leave, but want it to display in the calendar or, for staff who may be on Jury Duty for example and need to make an entry in a calendar.
When this option has been selected, a leave request still triggers an email to the person who would approve leave for the individual if it were required. The email will explain in the body that the request has been marked as approved in accordance with the leave policy.
Date and Duration Calculation
When an employee requests leave, the system refers to their Working Day Template to calculate how many days they would need to use for the specified period of time off:
However, if you have a member of staff who works on a changing shift pattern, the system has no way of knowing which days they were scheduled to work or not. Therefore, for flexible workers, or workers with schedules that vary each week, we would recommend you turn this automation off by selecting "Yes" here:
When "Yes" has been checked, employees requesting leave against this policy will be required to enter the start date of their leave, the end date of their leave, and then also stipulate how many days of leave they will need over that timeframe. Approvers need to be vigilant when approving here, to ensure that these entries are correct.
Include in Bradford Factor calculations?
You can check "Yes" to include this leave type in your Bradford Factor Calculations.
The Bradford Factor is a formula used in HR and absence management to measure employee absenteeism. It's purpose is to measure the disruptive impact of frequent, short-term absences compared to occasional long-term absences. The formula is:
B = S² x D
Where:
- B = Bradford Factor score
- S = number of spells (instances) of absence in a set period (e.g., 12 months)
- D = total number of days absent in that same period
Change default date restrictions leave request dates?
Select "Yes" here to enable your staff to request leave outside of the default timeframes:
Starting Date Threshold
The starting date threshold allows you to give employees the ability to request leave retrospectively or to enter a minimum amount of notice required before a period of leave.
For example, if the starting date threshold is -30, an employee could return to work after a week of sick leave and retrospectively enter that leave into the system, if it were within the last 30 days. Whereas if the starting date threshold is 7, an employee would not be able to enter a leave request sooner than 7 days away, essentially meaning at least 7 days of notice is always given.
Ending Date Threshold
Similarly, the ending date threshold allows you to manage how far in advance somebody can request leave. For example, '365' would mean the employee cannot ask for leave that extend past one year from the date they are making the request.