Back in the day when I was employed, I used to be entitled to 20 days holiday a year. Like most companies, we had a “Use them or lose them” policy but when it came to asking for holiday, it was always a problem.

“Have you any idea how busy we are then” or, “That’s the end of the month and you know we need the figures quickly” etc etc.
Anyway, I used to lose loads of my holiday and always found it to be very unfair as they wouldn’t pay me for them and after all, I’d not needed to be covered and been very productive (i.e. made them money!)

When we started the business, I was adamant no one here would ever lose untaken holiday. There are some who we can’t do this for though (TUPE transfers who won’t come on to our T&C’s and insist on staying on their inherited contracts) but in the main we pay for any untaken holiday entitlement. Last October we paid out almost £20,000 in holiday entitlement and why shouldn’t we. Our hard-working staff deserve to get it if they haven’t had holiday and we haven’t needed to cover it. It seems ridiculous to me why companies wouldn’t do this, other than greed.

The other thing that used to be an issue was operating the holiday year from January to December. This meant that if an employee had used their entitlement by the Autumn, none was left for Christmas and customers sometimes closed. Sometimes they didn’t close but often we’d not know until December which left staff with unpaid holidays. We decided, therefore to change the holiday year to start November 1st which meant that, by the festive period, our staff had banked holiday that could be taken at that time. Again, easy to do, cost us nothing to do and meant there were a lot more ‘happy’ staff enjoying paid family time.

If you look after your people, they look after the customers, it’s a win win.