Leave & Absence
Holiday policy, sickness, no-shows and how to handle all three without turning into the absence police.
4 articles
In this category
Everyone wants the same two weeks off
In an operation that cannot close, peak leave is a rationing problem. The method you pick decides who gets the summer, and picking none at all just means the fastest email wins.
The Bradford Factor, and what a score cannot tell you
It squares the number of absences and multiplies by the days, so ten one-day absences score a hundred times a ten-day one. The arithmetic is defensible. What people do with the output usually is not.
Managing unplanned absence without punishing people
Absence policies tend to be built to catch the small number of people gaming them, and end up penalising the much larger number who are simply ill.
A holiday policy your team will not argue with
Most holiday disputes are not about the answer. They are about the process - who decided, on what basis, and why nobody could see it coming.