What Should You Do When An Employee Is Absent After You Have Refused Their Request For Annual Leave?

Most business owners know that it’s essential to have a HR policy in place to ensure that requests for annual leave are handled fairly and efficiently and to make sure that the business doesn’t grind to a halt because too many people are off at the same time.

But what happens when you’re forced to decline a request for leave, and then the employee in question fails to turn up for work?  Your initial reaction might be one of scepticism in thinking that they’re ‘swinging the lead’, and you could be right; however, before you jump to conclusions it’s important to get all your facts together so you understand the full picture.

If your employee has followed your absence reporting procedure and called in sick it could be a genuine coincidence, and you should give them the benefit of the doubt before you go wading in.

If, however, your employee simply fails to turn up for work and provides no reasonable explanation, then it’s an entirely different matter. In these circumstances, you should investigate the absence to find out whether it was genuine and if appropriate follow your disciplinary policy and procedure. 

These situations are much easier to handle if you already have processes and systems in place.  However, if you haven’t faced this situation before it’s likely that you haven’t given it a lot of thought until now.

You are certainly not alone.  Many business owners overlook things like this until an issue arises and we don’t judge businesses on what they haven’t done; we work with them to put processes and systems in place to help them.

Prevention is always better than cure, and if you would like to have a no-obligation chat with us to see how we could help you please get in touch by completing the Contact Form or calling us on 01604 763494 to arrange your no-obligation discussion.