A reader writes:
I am the director of a small, public-facing unit. We have a full-time staff of 10 and several part-time workers. I am struggling with our leave system and how to make it as equitable as possible.
Current policy (that I inherited) is that employees can put in all leave for the following year beginning in November of the previous year, and first-come first-serve wins. We have some employees who quickly take a lot of the prime spots, particularly around spring break and holidays. Not everyone can plan ahead like this, however, and so some of our people then get little to no time around the holidays because we have to have coverage for open hours (including weekends). It’s also a problem because I don’t know what staffing may look like that far in advance to know how many people can be off.
It’s also difficult because so much of it feels nebulous and hard to enforce. For example, one employee took seven work days off in the middle of a two-month-long initiative that they oversee (which happens every year at the same time). So, it’s hard to say they can never have that time off, but yet it creates some hardship when they leave in the middle of it every single year. Also difficult to turn into a policy is that it’s hard when certain people are off at the same time because of specific job responsibilities, and two of those people are the two who tend to request most of holidays in advance.
In other words, no one is doing anything wrong, but it would be nice to make sure that employees who can’t plan a year ahead (or were not hired until mid-year) also have options for holiday time. I also understand that first-come first-serve is really the easiest to have hard and fast rules around. I don’t want it to be subjective, but some aspects are kind of subjective!
For what it’s worth, it doesn’t adversely impact me because I’m not a part of the coverage computations. Also, to be completely honest, part of my issue is the sense of entitlement I get from a few employees that I have to give them all the days they want because they beat everybody else to the punch, which is my own issue to work through.
If I change it, I know it’s going to rock the boat, so want to make sure I have thought through all the things before making changes.
Yeah, this is a bad policy if it means that the same people keep claiming all the most prized vacation slots and no one else can ever have them. That’s not fair to others, and it’s going to demoralize and frustrate large chunks of your staff.
The biggest change I’d recommend is this: identify the most desirable time off slots throughout the year, say that no one can have all of them unless there’s still no competition for them X months out (maybe three to four months, depending on what’s practical for your team’s circumstances), and ask people who are submitting requests for the entire year up-front to rank their preferences when submitting. That means they’ll get some of those most-desired slots but not all of them, because you’ll hold some of them open for people who don’t submit a year ahead of time. (You’ll still need to have some later cut-off date for those slots so that people can plan with confidence — but it doesn’t need to be November for the entire following year.)
As for the person who keeps taking a week off in the middle of their two-month-long initiative every year: you don’t have to approve every vacation request someone submits just because they got it in before anyone else claimed that time. If the time off falls at a particularly bad time for their particular job, you can push back. In some cases that might mean saying, “That’s the one time of the year when you really can’t take a week off because of X key piece of your job.” In others it might mean a conversation — “It would be rough to have you out that week because of X. Do you have any flexibility on when you do this?” and “To make this work, I’d need you to come up with a plan for ensuring XYZ is taken care of before you go. Can we talk about whether there’s a realistic way to do that?”
