Advanced Settings within a Leave Policy
When building out your leave policies within HR Partner, you will notice you have the ability to adjust the "Advanced Settings" towards the lower half of the screen:
Going through the options in this section, you'll see that you can make adjustments to the following areas...
Sort Order
This is where you stipulate where in your list of leave policies you would like this particular policy to display both;
(1) when the employee is requesting leave
and, (2) when your Admin Users are working on Policies.
If the sort order remains unchanged, the sort order for every policy will default to "1" and the system will sort your policies alphabetically.
The sort order is a particularly useful feature if you have policies within your system that you no longer use, as you can send them to the end of the list so that they don't clutter your list and confuse your System Admin Users.
Visibility
This function allows you to stipulate whether a policy can be viewed by employees when requesting leave, and whether you'd like employees to be able to see approved requests made against this policy in their Employee Portal Calendar.
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 to do this 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 Feed
The calendar within the Admin Portal of your HR Partner account has an iCal feed, which means you can push calendar entries from HR Partner into either your Outlook or Google Calendar. This section of the Advanced settings menu is where you can control how much information gets sent as part of that iCal feed. 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.
Auto Approval
Auto Approval allows requests made against certain policies to 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
Normally, when an employee requests leave, the system will refer back to the associated Working Day Template for that employee to automatically calculate how many of their working days they would need off in that period.
However, if you have a member of staff who works different days each week, the system has no way of knowing whether the Friday in their leave request is a Friday 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. This can be done by checking the box to "Disable the date and duration calculator".
When this 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.
Bradford Factor
The Bradford Factor is a formula that enables organisations to apply a score to employees based on their unplanned absences. The formula used to calculate the Bradford Factor is S² x D = B
- S is the total number of separate absences by an individual
- D is the total number of days of absence of that individual
- B is the Bradford Factor score
If your company calculates the Bradford Factor, you can select whether a specific policy contributes towards it under the Bradford Factor heading of the Advanced Settings menu. We give you this option because our customers have so much flexibility when configuring their leave policies within the system, that we have no way of knowing whether or not a specific policy is designed to record to unplanned leave. Normally, you should only have unplanned types of leave - eg Sick Leave - included in the Bradford Factor calculations.
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.