Hi Everyone! We're a small team of 15 people, our founders want to keep a policy where people don't have to apply for leaves on the portal, but just inform their availability in advance. Since we're not keeping records, people have been taking unlimited leaves which is now affecting the performance of the team, we tried speaking to them one on one but the issue still persists. The founders still insist on not asking people to apply for leaves on the portal, can you please share some suggestions on how to bring more sense of taking leaves among people.

Subhangi not a huge fan of unlimited leaves as it I have always seen polar reaction to this. Either you don't use it or you end up misusing it. Something which we have been following at Springworks: Yes we do ask folks to apply leaves on the system but our leaves are without approvals which means you don't have to get it approved by your managers. Adding notes while applying for leaves are not mandatory, hence it becomes a matter of clicking 3 buttons to take leaves (which is as good as informing people) Further to this we encourage folks to add status when on leave on slack so it becomes very easy to coordinate. My advice to this is let employees apply but without approvals and notes. This helps employees also plan it better, further think of giving a finite leave balance but without any approvals this again helps employees to take their leveas with more planning and you can avoid the performance challenges

@Shubhangi Negi, An interesting challenge but for sure have a solution for the same. Leaves are meant to be taking time off for any personal or unexpected situations to handle. As HR, we always wanted it to be tracked but miss the intent of taking leaves. I guess your founders are more keen on creating an ownership of taking paid time off and in due course of time, it is the people who need to understand that as a common rule. Here are my two cents about this. 1. Suggest you talk to the heads/managers to make them talk to employees about unplanned leaves which are impacting productivity. 2. Create the productivity map with the help of the respective managers/heads to showcase the same to the employees/associates. This action will also notify everyone stating how opting in for unplanned leaves is impacting the organization's productivity. I am sure you have a great team who understand this and will have a course correction 🙂

Thankyou so much @Rohan Mankad and @Sudhir Suguru for your valuable suggestings. ☺️