Adding and managing time off types and policies

Time-off management enables you to manage your employees’ time off within Workable. This article will walk you through creating and managing time-off types and policies that may apply to different groups of employees.

📌 Prerequisites:

Create your work schedules and assign them to your employees.
Create and configure the public holidays or any specific company holidays that won't count against your employees' balance (if the time-off type settings dictate so)

To get started, navigate to the Employee Management section in Settings and select Time off.

Time off types

By default, there will be 3 time-off types added to your account, acting as a guide for the HR admins:

Paid time off
Sick leave
Unpaid leave

Adding a time-off type

To create a new time-off type as an HR Admin, click Add time-off type on the upper right of the page. You will be prompted to define:

Name: must be unique within your account
Description
Paid/Unpaid toggle: default value will be paid
Approvals: Require approval toggle (default false); if toggled on you will be prompted to select the approvers from a list. Approvers can be specific employees or roles.
Calendar settings
- Count company holidays as work days
  When this setting is enabled, the calculation of the requested amount in this time-off type will ignore any company holidays that are set up for the employee’s entity or location.
- Count weekends as work days
  When this setting is enabled, the calculation of the requested amount in this time-off type will include non-working days of the employees’ work schedules as if they were working days.
- Show time-off type to all employees
  When this setting is enabled, the time-off type of employees' absence will be shown in the employee profile header and the Time-off company calendar. HR Admins can also choose the color that they want this time-off type to use in the calendar.
  
  When this setting is disabled, employees’ time-off type won't be shown anywhere. In the employee profile header, we will show just "On leave" while in the Time-off calendar the request will be shown in gray color.
Google/Microsoft Calendar integration setting
When this setting is enabled, your employees can connect their calendars and automatically sync their approved time-off requests as out-of-office events in their Google/Microsoft calendars. The setting will be enabled by default for all new time off policies (if you have existing policies you will need to enable it manually via the setting toggle).

Managing a time-off type

HR Admins have full control over time-off types, with the ability to edit, change order, or delete them as needed from the contextual menu of each time-off type.

Action	Explanation/notes
Edit	Existing time-off requests or approvals will remain unaffected by any calendar settings or approval-related changes made by HR Adminis. Any requests created after these changes will follow the latest rules.
Change order	Change the order of time-off types using the arrows next to each type. The new ordering is applied immediately in the employee profile time-off section.
Delete	Delete a time-off type that does not include any assigned policies to employees. Time off types with policies assigned to employees can't be deleted.

Time off policies

For each time-off type, there may be different rules & balances applicable to employees, which can be covered by creating different time-off policies in each time-off type. Common factors for establishing these policies include:

Employee location (different time-off legislation by country/state)
Cycle renewal date (fixed or based on employee's start date)
Employee past experience
Employee work schedule (different allocation for part-time/full-time employees)

Adding a time-off policy

To create a new time-off policy (within a time-off type) as an HR Admin click + Add policy to the right of the time-off type row.

Time-off policy settings are grouped into six stages:

1. Basic information

Here you will be prompted to define:

Policy name: must be unique within each time-off type
Entities and locations: If a policy is created for a specific company entity, location, or site HR admins can select the applicable values; otherwise, it can be left blank

2. Policy cycle

Here you will be prompted to define:

Policy type: renewing based on the defined cycle or assigned once
Renewal cycle: how often the policy cycle renews (year, quarter, month)
Renewal date; policy renews on:
- Employment anniversary: commonly used in the UK
- On a custom date (default - January 1st each year): commonly used in US and EU countries
Time-off tracking: full days, half days, hours

3. Accrual levels

Each time-off policy can have multiple accrual levels, which might have different amounts of days/hours allocated to employees based on their years of service within a company or the number of policy cycles completed during employment. Here, you will be prompted to define:

If the time off at this level is limited (default) or unlimited
Total days/hours off in the policy cycle
Accrual cycle; Accrued per: Year, Quarter, Month
Accrual limit; When the “Set a maximum accrual period” is selected, you must set a maximum number of days that the employee balance can reach during every renewal. When an employee carries over days or hasn't taken any time off during the previous cycle, then the renewal will happen up to the maximum amount set.

When a time-off policy has multiple levels created, for each one of the 2nd level and onwards, the HR Admin needs to define when the employee should move to each level based on:

Years of service in the company, i.e, “1 year after start date”
Number of cycles elapsed in the policy, i.e, “After 2 cycles”

4. Proration

Choose how much time off employees will receive if they join or leave the company midway through a policy cycle.

Start of employment
- Allow total days in cycle to be taken: When an employee joins the company, the entire accrual cycle's amount will be allocated and made available for utilization.
- Prorate to employee start date: When employees join the company, their allocated time off is proportional to the number of days between their start date and the end of the cycle.

Example: An employee joining the company on July 1st will be allocated half the amount of the PTO policy if the policy cycle is set to renew every January 1st, as the employee will be actually working half of the cycle for the company.

End of employment
- Allow total days in cycle to be taken: All allocated days will be available to an employee with a scheduled offboarding without any proration on the employment end date.
- Prorate to employee leave date: Employees can take time off based on their active accrual days, and the balance will be recalculated when offboarding is scheduled.

5. Approvals

By default, a time-off policy follows the approval flow assigned to the time-off type it belongs to. HR admins can define custom approval flows for specific policies, overriding the default approval flow that the time-off type is using. In this case, HR Admins will be prompted to select the approvers from a list. Approvers can be specific employees or roles.

6. Additional settings (carry over, absence documentation)

The additional settings section includes settings necessary for implementing more complex policies. Both settings will be disabled by default.

Carry over

HR Admins can define in each policy if the employees can carry over any unused days/hours in the next cycle and if/when these days/hours should expire. In the below example, employees are allowed to carry over up to 5 days and utilize them within a 3-month period. If you wish to set this up as a never-expiring carryover, select the option 'Does not expire'.

Absence documentation

HR Admins can define if the employees need to provide an attachment for a time-off request and also when this is required. Each attachment needs to have a description and the definition of the days that make it required.

Example: For a sick leave request, employees need to provide a doctor’s note when the request is more than 3 consecutive working days long.

Managing a time-off policy

HR Admins have full control over time-off policies, with the ability to edit, disable/enable or delete them as needed from the contextual menu of each time-off policy.

Action	Explanation/notes
Edit	Editing a policy is limited for some settings (disabled settings will appear greyed out) if the policy has already been assigned to at least one employee. Any changes will be applied on the next accrual or cycle renewal. Existing time-off balances and requests created before the policy was edited will not be affected.
Disable	Disable a time-off policy that is already assigned to one or more employees to prevent it from being available for any new assignments. A disabled marker will appear next to disabled policies. The already assigned employees won't be affected.
Enable	Enable a disabled time-off policy to make it available for new assignments to employees. Employees assigned to the policy before it was initially disabled won't be affected. This means their current balances and any time-off requests for that time-off type and policy will remain unchanged.
Delete	Delete a time-off policy that is not currently assigned to employees. Deleted policies won't be able to be restored.

To view the list of employees assigned to each time-off policy, click on the number “pill” as shown below.

👉 Next steps: Assign time-off policies to employees

Related to:

time off