How to manage annual leave requests over Christmas

Managing a Christmas shutdown: Can you force employees to take holiday?

If you know that your business will always shut down between Christmas and New Year, we recommend letting employees know about this as far in advance as possible.

Ideally, you’ll have included this in your employment contracts, so that employees are aware from the moment they join you.

You’ll need to let staff know as soon as possible if you expect them to keep back sufficient holiday to cover a Christmas shut down.

HR software can really help here as you can pre-book the necessary days for all your employees yourself, preventing them from using them elsewhere in the year.

No clause in your contract regarding Christmas annual leave?

It’s not essential to have a clause in your employment contracts if you want employees to take holiday over Christmas and New Year.

By law, you only need to give them at least twice the amount of notice as the number of days of holiday that you want them to take.

So, if you wanted them to take 4 days off over Christmas, you’d have to give them at least 8 days’ notice. Be mindful though that such short notice may lead to disgruntled employees!

The practical difficulty with doing this is that if your holiday year is January to December, employees may not have any holiday allowance left if you haven’t warned them in advance to save the holiday.

You may be able to negotiate that employees deduct any shortfall in the number of days holiday they would need from the new holiday year allowance, but this will require their agreement.

If they’re reluctant to do this, your options would either be to allow them to work, if it’s still practical for them to do so, or to offer a one-off additional holiday allowance for the year.

Busy over the festive season but everyone wants time off?

If your business is busy during the holidays you can limit annual leave during this time, but it’s important to make this clear in advance, ideally in your employment contracts.

One way to approach this is to allocate leave on a first-come, first-served basis.

Alternatively, you could ask everyone to submit requests for time off over Christmas as early in the year as possible, and try to fulfil each request as fully and as fairly as possible given business needs and competing requests.

Other options involve tracking annual leave each year, so that it isn’t always the same people getting the time off.

Already granted annual leave for the festive season but need to retract it?

Going back on your acceptance of an annual leave request isn’t advisable, but it would be possible to do so, if faced with a business-critical emergency. You’d also have to be prepared to pay compensation if the employee was to lose money spent on a holiday booking or travel arrangements.

Needless to say, it’s also important to consider the impact on staff morale that an about-turn like this will have.

A few more tips to take the stress out of Christmas annual leave

• Encourage staff to submit annual leave requests as far in advance as possible.
• Regularly review how much annual leave your staff have taken throughout the year.
• Be proactive in encouraging staff to take annual leave, especially if you need annual leave requests to be well spaced across the whole year to ensure you have enough cover.

Well-written employment contracts, good internal communication and a streamlined process for submission and review of annual leave are the keys to avoiding the common pitfalls that tend to arise around annual leave towards the end of the year.

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