Days worked vs working days

My Intranet, an intranet solution with a software module to manage leaves and absences, offers to manage leaves as working days, days worked, calendar days and hours.

Managing leaves as days worked

As a rule, when dealing with paid leaves as days worked, the employee benefits from a quota of 25 paid leave days per year (5 weeks of 5 days worked). One week is then accounted for as a 5 worked days period, from Monday to Friday.

Managing leaves as working days

When dealing with leaves as working days, the employee benefits from a quota of 30 paid leave days per year (5 weeks of 6 days worked). A week is then accounted for from Monday to Saturday, which means 6 working days. When employees want a week off, the request is submitted from Monday to Saturday, i.e. 6 working days to be counted out of their earned balance.

Managing leaves as calendar days

When counting with calendar days, every single day will be impacting. As a result, for a week holiday from Monday to Sunday, 7 days will be counted.

Managing leaves as hours

Employees are granted an hour yearly quota for their holidays which they will require either on a free basis or according to a predefined daily time-table hourly impact. So instead of counting the days of leave, we will count the hours.

Part-time : what is the impact on the count?

There are two ways to manage the leave of a part-time employee :

  • Either by prorating the quota of days acquired, which means for example that if we work in working days, the employee working 80% of the time will benefit from 20 days instead of 25. As a result, when he takes time off, the day of part-time absence will not have any impact.
  • or without prorating the quota of days, which means that the part-time employee has the same rights as a full-time employee. In this case, when he takes some leaves, all the days of his working week are counted in the calculation method, including those where he is absent on a part-time basis.

Flexible management of days worked

In some companies, the weekly work schedule is not the same from one week to the next. This is particularly the case in stores where an employee may have a floating rest day during the week. Very often, HR softwares don’t have the flexibility to accommodate this way of working. Fortunately, in My Intranet, you have the possibility to manage this in a very simple way by changing the weekly rest day from one week to another for each employee.

Days worked vs working days : which one is easier to handle?

Working days correspond to a fairly old usage in the Labour Code. It is still widely used in companies, especially when they were established a long time ago. If your collective agreement or even a company agreement gives you the opportunity to choose between management in days worked vs working days, it is strongly recommended that you use days worked, which is much simpler to follow when calculating leave for both employees and the HR department.

The impact of public holidays

It may happen that an employee takes a leave that includes a public holiday. If the public holiday is a day that is not normally worked in the company, that day will not be counted while calculating the employee’s days off. For example, if we operate on a working days basis and an employee has a full week with a Saturday falling on a public holiday, only 5 days will be counted instead of the usual 6.