One of the most important aspects of running a business is managing and approving your employee's time off. This could be a vacation, a sick day, or simply a day off. When it comes to time off each of your employees should know and understand, from the first day of work what the policies are regarding time off. Policies should be clear and accessible to your employee, and they should know exactly how much time off they receive whether it's paid or unpaid, and their current balance. When employees don't have access to this information, it demonstrates that time off is not a priority to the company, and that can hamper employee productivity. With Connecteam's time-off feature, you can create all the policies you need, in a way that is transparent to both your managers and employees.

In this article we will go over:

A Policy Type: refers to the type of time off you would like to give your employees.

These can be, for example, time off, sick leave, jury duty, parental leave bereavement, and so on. A policy type can be either paid or unpaid. To add a policy type click on 'Add Policy type' in the paid or unpaid sections and then select the policy type or create a policy type.

Policies: are created under a policy type and allow managers to set rules that can be specific to the employees assigned to the policy. For example, Paid time off for full-time employees or Paid time off for part-time employees.

Let's use an example to better understand the differences.

We added a policy type called paid time off. This is the type of time off I'm giving employees. We have however two different policies because there are full-time and hourly employees. Under my paid time off policy, I will create two policies one for my Full-time employees and one for my hourly. Each policy will contain the relevant rules, and be assigned to different users.

💡 Tip: Employees can only be assigned to one policy under a policy type. If we continue with the example above, this means each employee can be assigned to either the Full-time PTO policy OR the Hourly Employee PTO, but not both.

Once you added your policy type it's time to start adding the policies. This can be done by clicking on 'Add policy'. We will show you how to do this step by step below. Before we begin setting our policies however it's important to understand what policies can be set with Connecteam. Although you can set as many policies as you need each policy can be limited and unlimited, regardless of if it's paid or unpaid, or what type it is. If a policy is limited then it can be fixed or hourly.

Let's go over the main differences between these below:

When a policy is limited the amount of time an employee accrues (ie. receives) can be either fixed or hourly.

In Connecteam, limited and unlimited policies are set differently. In this section, we will break down the steps of setting both limited and unlimited time off policies.

To begin navigate to your Time off feature on the left sidebar. Once inside choose whether you want to create a paid or unpaid policy, click on 'Add policy', and choose the policy type or create a custom one. After that, you'll immediately get asked to create your first policy. Let's click on that!

In the example below you can see I choose to create an unpaid personal day policy type.

Step 2: Name the Policy

After selecting 'Create first policy', you will name your policy and choose if the policy will be calculated by hours or days.

Then, decide if it is limited or unlimited. Since in this example we are creating an unlimited policy we will select unlimited and select next.

Now we will set our general settings for the policy, meaning on which days of the week the policy is in effect and how long a working day is. Then we will decide whether or not a time off request needs a manager's approval, and if needed we set the limit for how many days before the time off request can get submitted. Finally, we click on 'Next step'.

In our example, we set the working days to be Monday to Friday 8 hours a day. We require the manager's approval, but there is no limit to how far in advance the request needs to be made. Take a look at how this looks below:

Now we select the users to whom we want to assign the policy and select the next step.

💡 Tip: If the policy applies only to a certain group of employees for which you create a smart group, you can use the filter to quickly find them.

Congrats! You have created your first policy!

Take a look at how the process looks from start to finish below:

Now let's get started on how to set up other types of policies that are not unlimited.

Limited policies are set up similarly to unlimited policies, but require a few extra steps - including setting your employee's balance. Before setting up limited policies we recommend you come prepared with a list of your employees' current time off balance. Now let's get started!

Similar to above, navigate to the Time Off feature on the left sidebar, choose to create a paid or unpaid policy, and click 'Create policy'. Then click '+ Add type', choose your policy type or build a custom one, and select 'Create type'. Click on the option to create your first policy. In the example below I create a Paid Time Off Policy.

After selecting 'Create first policy', you will name your policy and choose if the policy will be calculated by hours or days.

Then decide if it is limited or unlimited. Since we are creating a limited policy I select limited.

Now I need to decide how the limited time off accrues, as mentioned previously it can be fixed, meaning the employee received a certain amount of time off per year, or hourly, meaning employees accrue a certain amount of time off based on their hours worked.

When setting up a limited policy, you need to define the Beginning of the Year. You can choose between three options: calendar year (January 1st), a custom date, or the employee's work anniversary.

In the example below, you can see I chose a fixed policy where employees earn 200 hours per year. I set a custom year, where the beginning of the year is April 10th, and the employees will accrue these hours all at once on this date.

Step 5: Set the Policy's General Settings

Now, we set our general settings for the policy. We set the days of the week the policy is in effect and how long a working day is. We decide whether time off requests need a manager's approval, and if needed, we set the limitation that determines the minimum time users can request time off in advance.

Finally, you need to set the Yearly Accrual Limit and the Carryover Limit. The 'yearly accrual limit' setting is available only if the policy is accrued hourly, and it allows you to define the maximum amount of time off an employee can accrue in a calendar year. Once this limit is reached, employees will no longer accumulate additional time off until the next year. The 'carryover limit' lets you set the maximum number of days an employee can carry over from one year to the next.

Once you are ready, go to the next step.

In the example below, you can see I set the working hours to be Monday to Friday, the day length to be 8 hours, requests as requiring approval, to have a 4-day limit, for the yearly accrual limit to be 18 days, and allowed 5 days to be carried over.

After setting the policy itself, it's time to assign it to users as done above and press next.

Now that we assigned users we need to set their time off balances - meaning how much time off they accrued until now. Since you are moving your time off to Connecteam, it's important to understand that for each user this is a unique number as each employee may have accrued or taken a different amount of time off. Enter the balance next to the assigned users and when done, press the next step.

Congrats! You just created another policy. Now that we are done with that let's go over how these policies appear for users.

Now let's go over a few examples of policies we can have

For jury duty, creating an unlimited paid policy for jury duty would be ideal.

We would create an unlimited policy because it is never up to the employee how much jury duty they are called for.

With sick leave, you can create different policies depending on the rules and regulations of the country you live in. Some countries require you to offer employees a certain amount of sick leave, and it's paid, while other countries require none at all. In our case, our employees are entitled to a fixed amount of 250 hours of Paid Sick Leave.

Another place you may use a limited fixed time off is for paid holidays, floating holidays, or bereavement leave if your company offers these.

If I have employees who are hourly workers, they may not work a fixed amount of hours and therefore are not entitled to a fixed amount of time off. Instead, they earn time off based on the number of hours they work. In hour case our employees early 16 hours for 120 hours they work.

In this article, we went over the different policies and how to create them. We learned about unlimited and limited policies. When using limited policies we learned about fixed and hourly policies and when to use each one. Finally, we went over a few common examples of policies you might be using in your organization and how to set these up.

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