Q: We have a few employees we are monitoring by spreadsheet for their pattern of work as they don’t fit the perfect week. This is because a week is not defined in their agreement OR the week that is defined is vastly different to their actual pattern of work so they have a huge HP rate. I feel alot more confident knowing the pattern of work when it comes to them taking annual leave. Our employer allows annual leave to be used as it accrues, generally this isn’t so much an issue with a perfectly defined week and work pattern but not in this variable case. So if we cannot average time per the Holiday’s Act, then what is the best way to look at this pattern of work and determine a week when applying the 4 weeks annual leave entitlement?

A: If you apply Section 17 (what genuinely constitutes a working week for the employee) it could mean when the employee takes annual holidays the week is defined at that point in time as their week and annual holiday entitlement earned is changed to reflect the new week.  You would need to discuss this with the employee.  Messy but that does follow what the act requires when the week cannot be clearly defined.

Another way is to reassess the week at a set point (every quarter) and change the base week if the week has changed (again needed to involve the employee).

Q: How about when we arrive at their 12 month anniversary and apply their 4 weeks of entitlement? Without working out an average of days they work per week x 4 weeks, (we hold annual leave in days), would it be a fair assessment to review the past 3 months and apply entitlement based on that?

Also, could an alternative be is we may already have a base week of say 3 days per week in their contract (12days 4wks AL) and disregard they’ve worked 5 days per week over the past year, they’d still receive 12 days (4 weeks) AL and an inflated HP rate from AWE?

A: It would be a fair assessment if employees were consulted and agreed to this period of time to be used.