Flexible leave policy restrictions

In the past, we've had a way of restricting leave policies to only employees in a particular Location in HR Partner (i.e. your employees in the UK could have completely different leave accrual rules than employees in Australia etc.).  Well, even though that has worked well, we have been asked for extra restrictions based around the Position or Employment Status, or even Gender.

For instance, you might only want to give Sick Leave to full time staff, or else team member in Management may get more days allocated or have different accrual rules from line employees.  The most common request was to have Maternity Leave rules just for female employees (obviously).  No point in showing that to your male employee, unless you have set up a separate Paternity Leave policy just for them!

Well, we have just pushed out an update today that will allow you to do just this.

When looking at your leave policies now, you will see new rules restrictions next to the policy name.

When you go to edit the policy, you will see a blue button which will expand a section to let you edit the restriction rules.

As you can see, you can set restrictions based on Location, Employment Status, Position, Gender, and even Employee Tags.

Simply choose from the drop downs as to which restrictions will be applied.  In our example above, we are editing the Maternity Leave policy, and we have set it so that it will only be seen by (a) Full time employees, (b) Only employees in the 'Manager' or 'Financial Controller' position, and (c) Only female employees.

Warning - Be very careful about setting overly restrictive policies (i.e. too many items selected), because if you have employees with this leave policy already, and a restriction makes them ineligible for it, the policy and their leave balance will be removed from the system.  There is NO way to reverse this, so please choose and set your restrictions carefully.

Validating Existing Policies

If you have leave policies already allocated to employees, and you make changes to the restrictions, you may find sometimes that your employees will still have leave policies associated with them that should no longer be there due to the new restriction rules.

If this happens, then you can always run a quick validation routine to ensure that the restriction rules are re-applied to everyone.

Simply go to Setup -> Tools -> Advanced, and then move the slider next to 'Check leave restriction setups' is set to 'ON' then click 'Run'.

This will run through your employees and compare their conditions against the leave policy restrictions and remove or add policies to each employee accordingly.  Please be warned that this can cause leave balances to be deleted if the policy restrictions are not set correctly.

As always, please call our friendly team if you need any assistance at all.