One of the most important, yet challenging aspects of running a business is managing and approving your employees' time off. A part of an all-and-one solution, Connecteam's time-off feature provides full digitization of time-off processes, with no calculations needed. Simply create policies, assign them to the relevant users, and let connecteam do the rest.
If your employees accrue time off based on tenure then it is important to set things in a particular way in order to make sure everything stays running smoothly.
This article will guide you through how to set up time off for tenure accrual by going over:
What is Tenure Accrual
First, let's begin by defining tenure accrual. If you are using tenure accrual it means that your employees receive a certain amount of time off based on the amount of time they have worked at the company. For example, employees with less than 1 year may receive 10 days of PTO, while employees with 2 may receive 15, and so on.
Now that we've got our definitions straight let's set this up.
Creating a Policy Type
The first step to setting up tenure/anniversary accrual is to create a time off policy type like you would for any other type. Simply navigate to the time off tab, decide if you're creating a paid or unpaid time off, and click on Add-Type. Choose from one of our existing policy types or create a custom one.
In the example, I created a Paid Time Off Type (PTO).
Creating Limited Policies Based On Tenure/Seniority
The next step will be to create a policy.
Step 1: Under the Relevant Policy Type Select Add Policy
Step 2: Name the Policy and Choose Limited.
We choose limited since we are creating a policy with a certain amount of time received based on the employee's tenure in the company.)
In the example below you can see I named the policy 1 Year Employees PTO
Step 3: Set the Accrual Settings, to Fixed or Hourly.
Hourly means employees receive x amount of time off per x amount of hours worked and Fixed means that employees receive a certain amount of time off per year. If you choose fixed you will also need to determine the accrual cycle - this refers to how your employees receive time off. The options are: at the start of the year, throughout the year in pay periods, or on their anniversary.
In the example below I set the settings to be fixed, with 96 hours and the accrual cycle as on the employee's anniversary date.
Step 4: Set the Policy Settings
First in the general settings meaning the work days the policy applies to and the work hours per day. Next, decide if the time-off requests require admins' approval and determine the minimum time in advance users may request a time off. Finally set the carryover limit - or how many hours they can transfer to the next year.
Step 5: Assign the Policy to the relevant employees.
Now, we are going to assign the policy to the relevant employees based on their tenure in the company. To do this we will use the filter in the upper left.
In our example, we are setting the PTO for our First Year Employees (meaning anyone who has worked at the company for less than 1 year. )
Click on the filer and select the custom field employee start date then ill set the criteria to be within the range of the last year and enter the smaller and larger number of years. In our case 0 and 1. This will filter out all my employees who have been at the company for less than 1 year.
Pro tip: There are many criteria you can set when using the employee start date we choose to use the range to ensure that we accurately place all of our employees into the right group.
Step 5: Setting the Balances
After filtering out and assigning the policy to the relevant users it's time to set their balances. Each employee has a unique balance based on the amount of time off they have already accrued. Set each employee
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Can't I Just Create Smart groups based on the start date and assign the policy to a smart group wouldn't that be easier?
Time off policies can only be assigned to individual users and not smart groups.
The reason is that an employee can be found in more than one smart group but can only have one time-off policy per type. You can always separate your employees into groups and use then filter for a group rather than an employee start date as done above.
Once somebody reached their work anniversary how do I make sure they get moved to the new policy?
When an employee reaches their work anniversary you will need to add them and transfer their balance to their new policy. To do this you will simply click edit assignments on the existing policy and remove them, from the policy (be sure to write down their current balance ahead of time). Then you'll navigate to the relevant policy click edit assignments and add them to the policy. As done above you'll also add their current balance.
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