Dear Praveena, The leave policy will depend on certain areas as required by your company. Begin your study with the Shops and Establishment Act as shared by Pon1965. Please consider the following suggestions:
General Guidelines:
- Cover all the areas including earned leaves, casual leaves, medical leaves, maternity, and miscellaneous along with the company-declared holidays and national holidays.
- IT companies follow a policy of 2.5 days of earned leaves to be availed post-confirmation.
- Medical leaves are 6-11 days depending upon the criticality of the health complications.
- Maternity leave remains as per the Shops and Establishment Act, which includes health complications and miscarriage.
Company-Specific Guidelines:
- The policy defining the eligibility for each leave.
- Set the policy for 'leave without balance'. Ideally, when employees exhaust their allocated leave balance, they take leave without pay. This will remain at your firm’s discretion to declare so. The firm can deduct the basic for those numbers of days for which leave is taken.
- Identify if your organization wants to offer a benefit of leaves and emphasize taking a break from work, then you may have little or no rule for leave encashment. Suppose if 22 days a year leave is allocated individually and an employee exhausts only 10 days, the rest of the 12 would be carried forward to the next year until it reaches the maximum level.
- The leave encashment when allowed is done either at the end of the year or at the time of separation. The calculation is done on the basic for the number of days accumulated for encashment.
- Please keep a cut for encashment. Suppose the encashment is allowed till a maximum number of 45 days. If an employee accumulates 50 days, 5 days will go for a lapse, and he will be paid the basic for 45 days only.
Process for Leave Application:
- Please mention the complete process to apply for leaves.
- Identify the decision matrix that requires to be followed, such as if a day's leave is applied, it may be approved by the reporting authority. In case it's more than a week or a fortnight, it may require permission from senior-level authority.
- In case there are any escalations, mention the contact number and email ID of the concerned authority to be contacted.
The administrative process would be different, but your policy must share the guidelines clearly until the version gets revised.
Regards, (Cite Contribution)