Our ‘Annual Leave Tracker’ can assist employers and managers with annual leave management. We also devised an ‘Absenteeism Tracker’ that helps you stay on top of managing employee absences. Both of these can be found here: https://thehrcompany.ie/index.php/blog/absenteeism-and-annual-leave-tracking/

Managing annual leave can be difficult for any business, especially during a pandemic. In order to successfully manage this, we recommend the following;

1. Annual Leave Policy – communicate the details of this policy to your employees. You can find this in your Employee Handbook. This policy expressly sets out an employees’ entitlement to paid annual leave, identifies the relevant leave year period and accurately details its approach to carry over of accrued but untaken leave. Please note, statutory annual leave needs to be taken and should not be paid to the employee instead. Any annual leave over the statutory entitlement can be paid.

2. Communication – inform your employees that everyone still has annual leave to take in a limited amount of time. Remind them, annual leave needs to be approved by management before they book any holidays. It is imperative to ensure continuity of business which will not be possible if everybody is absent at the same time. Management can deny annual leave requests within reason, and the period allocated should suit both the business and employee where possible.

3. Reminders – you can keep track of an employee’s annual leave entitlement using our annual leave tracker. Where an employee still has annual leave remaining, you can issue them with reminders, especially as the relevant leave year draws to a close.

This means that employees must be:

I. fully informed of their annual leave entitlements

II. actively encouraged to take their annual leave and

III. advised that the Company will require them to take their leave at a specific time

Given the unusual circumstances of the Covid-19 Crisis, many employees may carry over annual leave entitlements. If this is the case, their carried over leave should be used in the first 6 months of that year.

Furthermore, in relation to annual leave accrual, employees who were placed on a period of lay-off, do not accrue annual leave during this period. However, it should be noted that that on an annualised basis, an employee may still have worked the requirement of 1,365 hours within the leave year, even when they were placed on a period of lay-off. Therefore, if an employee has worked 1,365 hours or more in the whole year, they will still be entitled to receive a minimum of 4 working weeks of annual leave.

remaining, you can issue them with reminders, especially as the relevant leave year draws to a close.

4. Encouragement – to actively encourage staff to take holidays, it may be advisable for you to meet with individual employees who have a substantial number of untaken annual leave days accrued. A record of these conversations should be kept on their file. Employers are not required to force employees to take annual leave, but they must be able to show that they have attempted to enable the employee to take annual leave.

Public Holidays 2021 should be calculated by one of the following methods:

If an employee works on the public holiday, they are entitled to their payment for hours worked on the public holidays plus an additional day’s pay. To determine the additional days’ pay, you will look to the last day the employee worked prior to the public holidays and this will be the additional days’ pay.

· If the employee normally works on the day the public holidays falls, they are entitled to their normal days’ pay for the day, in addition to the public holidays off.

· If an employee does not normally work on the day the public holidays falls and is not required to work on the PH, they are entitled to one-fifth of their normal weekly wage.

Where a public holiday falls on a weekend (Christmas Day will fall on a Saturday in 2021), an employee does not have an automatic legal entitlement to have the next working day off work. As an employer, you can request employees to attend work on those days. When this happens, an employee is still entitled to one of the above entitlements, nonetheless.

Public Holidays Ireland in 2021:

We can support your business with any HR-related matter, contact one of our HR Advisors today, and start the year having the peace of mind you deserve.

Learn more about our services here.