Personal leave on Payslips

[qanda8]

We are transferring to a new payroll system. Currently our payslips show Annual, LSL and personal leave accruals. We are considering removing Personal leave accrual from payslips and we think this may be encouraging some employees to use their full personal leave accrual each year (ie take sick days).
Does anyone see any issues with this approach?

[Qld IR Consultant]

Nope. As long as the system, and subsequent hard copy pay slips, adhere to the minimum provisions of the Act then your fine......

[Moz]

I have never seen accrued balances on a pay slip for annual leave, LSL or personal leave!

However I believe both employees and their managers should be able to easily access this information.

[Greg Schmidt]

The leave balances don't have to be shown on the payslip. But the accrued leave is an entitlement of the employee, and they are allowed to use if they have a legitimate need. So Moz is right - the leave balances do need to be readily available to the employee, they can't be kept secret. The advantage of having the balances printed on the payslip is that HR staff don't have to spend time providing the same info by phone or email.

[qanda8]

Thanks Greg. Good point.

[ER-Enthusiast]

I have never worked anywhere where AL has not been on the payslip! Some places personal leave has also been there and others LSL in stead.

Interesting Moz!

Agreeing with Greg, the leave is accrued, no more is it the case of an employee has to wait 12 months until they can take a holiday (let's face it many employees don't even last that long)

[astina31]

With the personal leave being printed on the payslip...we use MYOB and it prints the personal leave on the payslip which means that every time one of my workers accrues a sick day he takes it. He gets paid on a Wed and has a a Thursday off....average of one day every 5 weeks. Awesome

[Greg Schmidt]

Astina,

Many (most?) employers would have a policy allowing employees to take a single day of personal leave without providing a medical certificate or other evidence. But section 107 allows the employer to require the employee to provide evidence that would satisfy a reasonable person that ... [the leave is taken for a legitimate purpose].

My point is that the pattern of leave usage by this employee may prompt a reasonable person to question the validity of his personal leave usage. So there may be grounds to depart from the usual policy and impose a requirement on this employee to provide evidence to substantiate every single day of personal leave usage from that point forward.

[astina31]

Hi Greg,

Thankfully this employee resigned (see my other posts) and is still causing me grief. On the other end of the spectrum my other employee has not had a sick day in 25 years. His last sick was when "his father died". I told him thats compassionate leave, he's such a love, he's a model employee.

[tubefeed]

We display AL but removed personal leave. I checked and you are not required to show it. We removed because of employees that took a day as soon as one was accrued on a regular basis.
As soon as it was removed we got a call from one of them asking where it was?! Our response was that you are still accruing leave and your AL is displayed which is the only leave that you require for planned absences!

[Tiger]

I'm of the view PASs should be included on the PAS. However, a lot depends on your systems, whether you have an ESS or still rely on paper leave forms and how compatible these are with your Payroll system.

A recent example of an ex-team member of mine supports the need for this and the transparency as mentioned by others. The ESS system showed she had a balance of x, yet when she went on her overseas trip, found she'd had monies deducted due to Payroll's view she didn't have enough accrued leave to cover her trip. Her beef was Payroll should be following the ESS - it got messy. She had a point but it does go to show that in this case, the systems simply don't talk to one another.

I have worked in companies who do and don't include Personal Leave Balances. Have to admit, I rarely took note of the PCL balance but then I'm rarely sick. Transparency is key and so I agree that if your systems are robust and correct, including it is an easy way for employees to easily know their balances. HR these days does not have sufficient resources to be fielding calls about leave balances.

I agree there are and will always be those who abuse the privelege of sick leave. However, I take the view that if they do abuse it, some day when they really genuinely need it, they won't have enough to cover it. So what goes around comes around.

Tiger

[NicoleAnita]

I have done this in the past - you will get the odd employee asking why it is not showing Simply state that it is a new payroll system and it does not have the option or just simply say you are not required by law to show it (whatever the company is comfortable doing). Tell those employees they can access their leave information from their manager or the payroll manager.

[Cottoneyes]

I've done this as well in the past and my only advise is to make 100% sure you have the full backing of the highest level in the company before making the change. I thought I did, had the usual employees complain (the same ones who took their sick day every 5 weeks as regular as clockwork) and they took the complaint right to the top. The CEO couldn't be bothered dealing with it and told me to restore the leave records to the payslips. That CEO didn't support much from HR though...

[Moz]

Transparency is key and so I agree that if your systems are robust and correct, including it is an easy way for employees to easily know their balances. HR these days does not have sufficient resources to be fielding calls about leave balances.

I'm with Tiger on this one.

Also, how do you know that the personal leave abusers won't ring HR every 4-5 weeks to find out how much personal leave they have accrued? You can bet they will be counting!

I wonder if you could get away with telling those who abuse their personal leave that a doctor's certificate will be required in future for even a single day's leave.

[Cottoneyes]

I'm with Tiger on this one.

Also, how do you know that the personal leave abusers won't ring HR every 4-5 weeks to find out how much personal leave they have accrued? You can bet they will be counting!

I wonder if you could get away with telling those who abuse their personal leave that a doctor's certificate will be required in future for even a single day's leave.

In the past I've instructed payroll to direct those type of requests back to the employee's manager (all managers had their employees leave balances in their MSS).

My current company has a policy where 2 days of personal leave per year do not require a medical certificate, all other leave needs a medical certficate to be paid. On the most part it is pretty successful