Agenda item

The Committee gave consideration to a scoping report which provided Members with details of the Council’s current holiday leave management for Council employees, together with the details of the alternative of ‘variable leave year’ holiday leave management.

The Council’s Organisational Development Manager attended the meeting and presented information on the advantages and disadvantages of both systems of holiday management.

The key issues were:-

• What is the Current Holiday Leave Procedure which this Council had for Council employees?
•  Looking at the distribution of holiday leave across the Council and to see if there were patterns which may have caused problems in any particular service area.
• To look at the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches to ‘Fixed Annual Leave Year’ and ‘Variable Leave Year’ Holiday.
• What were the cost implications and HR system changes which would be needed if the holiday management system and procedure changed?

The Committee was informed that the Council currently operated a fixed annual leave year for all employees synchronised with the financial year starting on the 1 April and continuing until 31 March. Reference was made to Council policy allowing employees to ‘carry over’ up to 5 days holiday leave into the following annual leave year.

Members were informed that leave entitlement, holiday requests and manager authorisation for leave was administered through an online self-service module of the Council’s current HR system, ResourceLink. The system served the Council very well, although effective management was needed to ensure that service delivery was not compromised when employees planned to take leave.

Members were provided with a bar chart which illustrated the distribution of employees annual holiday for 2012/13. The obvious peaks of leave taken were during the school holiday months of July and August, during December and the Christmas and new year period.

There was a third peak at the end of the holiday period in March but this was a gradual trend progression, rather than a significant ‘spike’.

The Committee asked that officers provide a breakdown of patterns of leave across all directorates and service areas to assess whether there were any distinct areas of the Council where there were exceptional ‘peaks’ which may impact on the delivery of services.

The Council’s Deputy Director for Strategic Finance attended the meeting and provided Members with her experience within the Finance Directorate where the financial year end coincided with employees’ end of leave year. Members were informed that managers were attuned with the responsibilities of the service and of the end of the financial year, so management of leave of staff was less of a problem. A move to a more flexible and variable leave year would cause more problems in terms of enabling managers to manage their staff annual leave requests.

Reference was made to the arrangements which existed in Teams throughout the Council whereby staff used Google Calendar to indicate holiday leave. This was a useful tool for managers to ensure sufficient officer cover within Teams.

Members were informed that the primary argument for an annual leave year was simplicity of managing and administering the process. Service planning and scheduling was simplified where there was only the single leave year to consider, rather than managers having to consider each employee’s individual leave year.

The Council’s Organisational Development Manager informed Members that if the annual leave for employees was moved to a personalised leave year, the Council’s HR system would require reconfiguration to enable the changes to be made to the leave year. This would result in obvious cost implications.

Reference was made to the plans for the Council to move to a new HR Platform (Oracle) in 2015 so any changes to ResourceLink would have a diminished return in value for any development investment made to the system.

Discussion took place on the evidence which had been presented and Members concluded that it would be inappropriate to consider implementing a change to the holiday leave management system at this moment in time. However, consideration could be given to revisiting this once the new Oracle HR system was implemented.

In view of the usage of Google Calendars by Teams within the Council, Members asked whether the new Oracle HR platform could link into Google Calendars. Also reference was made to a previous review recommendation relating to a Council held skills database, and Members asked if officers could investigate if the Oracle system had a skills capture element to it which include skills of all Council employees.

RESOLVED –

1.      That the information provided in the scoping report, together with the evidence provided by officers, be noted.

2.      That consideration of the Council’s holiday leave management procedure be revisited when the new Oracle HR platform has been implemented.