Confused About Leave Policy: Does a Holiday Count as Casual Leave?

Dear Members, I am in complete confusion. Please help me with the following scenario:

One of the employees of my company wants to take a casual leave on the 22nd (Monday) and 23rd (Tuesday) of October 2012. We have the weekend off on Saturday and Sunday.

On the 24th of October 2012, it's Dusshera, so it's a holiday on that day.

The employee will be absent from work from Saturday to Wednesday and will resume duties after the Dusshera holiday, i.e., on Thursday, the 25th of October 2012.

Now, I am confused if the Dusshera holiday will also be counted as a casual leave. Is the holiday being included in the casual leaves and weekends off?

Please help me with this as I need to clarify this to all the employees as well.

Thanks in Advance,

Regards, Harpreet Kaur

Perhaps this confusion is because your company does not have a clear HR policy/manual that spells out the rules regarding leave, among other things related to employee/HR matters. Generally, most companies do not allow an employee to prefix and suffix holidays with leave. What this means is that you are not allowed to sandwich your leave between two sets of holidays, as is the case above. So, most companies will treat the holidays as leave, and the employee will be debited 5 leaves (Saturday to Wednesday) instead of 2.

But as I said, that is the case when the leave policy is clearly spelled out. In the case of your organization, since the leave policy is not clear, the employee could be given the benefit of ambiguity, and you could use this opportunity to have an employee handbook created to take care of any such future issues.

Thanks and best regards

Dear Sir,

I do understand that the clubbing of holidays is always discouraged by employers, who count the public holidays that come in the way. However, I have a confusion here: The person has been to the office until Friday and is to be on leave starting Monday. So why should we be deducting leaves for Saturday and Sunday? As far as my knowledge goes, we should be debiting 3 days—Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (Dussehra)—if he is resuming on Thursday.

Please shed light on this as I am working on a project to develop HR in my firm.

Thanks for your time and advice.

Regards,

It all boils down to the policy the organization has. Our organization allows prefixes/suffixes to weekly offs/holidays; however, we cannot sandwich the weekly offs/holidays between casual leaves. In the mentioned case, we would have deducted only 2 days of casual leave.