How to Manage Employee Leave Requests: A Complete Guide

As a small business owner, you often juggle responsibilities and priorities. With so much to track, it can be easy to overlook the importance of managing your employees' time off requests.

Managing how and when your employees request time off is an important part of running a successful business. This helps ensure that your business is always staffed and ready to meet your customers' needs. It also helps you retain top talent, foster a strong company culture, and keep your business compliant with local labor laws.

In this article, we'll cover everything you need to know about managing employee time off requests, including:

How to Develop a Leave Request Policy How to manage leave requests How to handle overlapping PTO requests Types of leave

Before setting up your formal leave request policy, it is important to understand the different types of leave. There are two main types of leave, paid leave and unpaid leave.

Paid leave (PTO)

In the United States, there is no federal law requiring PTO. But some states have their own regulations mandating paid time off. It's important to understand your state's labor laws so you can develop a clear leave policy that keeps your company compliant.

Offering paid time off can be a great way to attract and retain employees, but it can also get expensive. When you receive a request for a PTO, you must consider the needs of your personnel and the needs of your business.

By finding the right balance, you can create a PTO policy that works for your employees and your business. The different types of PTOs include:

Paid Sick Leave: Employees who need time off due to a medical condition or illness. This includes caring for a sick family member or attending medical appointments. Vacation time: time off granted to employees and time off from work. Bereavement leave: leave for employees who have had a death in the family or who need leave to attend a funeral. Maternity/paternity leave: leave for new parents. Jury Duty or Voting Time: Paid time off to cover jury duty or to vote in an election. Leave without pay

Unpaid time off is self explanatory: it is time off for which employees are not paid. If your company does not offer PTO, all leave requests will fall into the unpaid category.

There is no federal law requiring paid sick leave in the United States. However, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires companies to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid job-protected leave each year for specific family and medical reasons.

Development of a leave request policy

Have written protocols that your employees can refer to when submitting leave requests. This is where your leave request policy comes in.

Your leave request policy should be easily accessible in an employee handbook, for example. This makes it easy for employees to access and refer to at any time.

These are the things your leave request policy should include.

How to request leave

Your policy should state how you want employees to request time off. Do not allow employees to make verbal requests for time off. This is not an effective way to track their leave.

Would you like to receive requests by email? Or do you prefer that they submit using a time off request template? What about time and attendance tracking software like Homebase?

Whatever you choose, make sure you keep track of everything. This helps you avoid missing requests or scheduling the wrong employees.

But even if you don't make obvious mistakes, manually requesting and tracking PTO requests can be time consuming.

If you use Homebase, your team members don't have to search online for a time off request template. They can easily submit their leave requests through the Homebase app.

All they have to do is log into their Homebase account, choose the “request time off” option, and select whether they want to take a full day or part of it. It's a convenient and streamlined process that can save everyone time and energy. ...