- A third of Brits have 50% of their holiday to take with only 25% of the year left
- Resourcing and burnout challenges feared by industry over a business ‘holiday debt’
Nottingham, UK. 6th October: A third of UK workers have half or more of their holiday allowance still to take this year, despite just 12 working weeks remaining in 2020, raising concerns over worker burnout and team resourcing issues during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Data gathered by absence intelligence company Edays on 50,000 of their users found that 37% of UK workers had 14 or more days of holiday to take before the end of the year, and with just 12 working weeks until the holiday break, companies face half their workforce being off at least a day a week until the new year. With Edays also finding that 69% of businesses have no way to track the cost of employee absence, the full financial impact is unknown.
With the cancellation of large amounts of holidays due to COVID-19 disruption, workers seem to be taking advantage of new rules announced earlier in the year. Workers who have not taken all of their statutory annual leave entitlement due to COVID-19 will now be able to carry it over into the next two leave years.
During a recent sponsored virtual event, Edays also surveyed 200 attendees and 85% of respondents felt that taking holiday had been much more challenging throughout the pandemic.
Currently, almost all workers are entitled to 28 days’ holiday including bank holidays each year. Until this year, most of this entitlement cannot be carried between leave years, meaning workers lose their holiday if they do not take it. Now, companies are scrambling to prepare suitable leave management systems that can deal with this ‘holiday backlog’, as well as providing support for workers affected by issues such as burnout and other illnesses.
Steve Arnold, CEO of Edays, commented: “The question for businesses in the run-up to Christmas, is how are they going to ensure teams can cope with multiple staff members in the same team going off at the same time? Will they allow carryover of days? Managing the holiday backlog is another issue for organisations at a time where they’re faced with a string of challenges. The first step they should be taking is to properly set up their HR systems to remove some of the strain.”
About Edays
Founded by CEO Steve Arnold and CTO Chris Moseley, Edays is an award-winning, cloud-based absence management and intelligence platform that makes holiday and absence management easy and accurate for organisations of all sizes, anywhere in the world. e-days delivers for more than 1,500 customers across 120 countries, including brands such as Canon, ASOS, AXA, Monster Energy, Barclays, and Sony.
The Edays mission is to provide organisations with key intelligence regarding staff absence – enabling them to build better staff management and wellbeing strategies. Absence intelligence allows businesses to achieve better resourcing insights, save time and money associated with employee absence, and promote excellent employee wellbeing and better health for organisational success.
Website: https://www.e-days.com
Twitter: @edayssoftware
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Harry is Head of Customer Success here at edays, helping organisations to get the very best out of their edays system. His experience in SaaS and HR brings valuable insight into how organisations can better manage their people, processes and productivity.