When home working is a leave type

Two assumptions about the same day

In one convention, a day worked from home is a normal working day with a different address. It needs no quota, only a note so people know where to find you.

In another, the office is the default and a day away from it is a granted exception. Each one is requested, approved and counted against an allowance.

Neither is right. They encode different assumptions about where work happens, and every HR product ships one of them as its default.

What a quota actually does

Attaching a number to home working changes behaviour in three ways, and only one of them is usually intended.

It creates a budget. Twelve days is a thing to spend, and people spend it, including on days they would have come in.

It creates a record. Every home-working day has a request, an approver and a date, which is genuinely useful when someone later asks how often the team was remote.

And it creates a scarcity conversation. Asking for a thirteenth day is asking for an exception, which is a different conversation from telling your manager where you will be on Thursday.

Reading a product's defaults

Defaults are the cheapest signal you get about a product's origins, and they are easy to check before any demo.

Our leave catalogue holds annual, casual, marriage, parental, sick or emergency, unpaid, and working from home. Each type carries a yearly quota and two flags: whether it is paid, and whether unused days can be encashed.

A profile in the same product holds blood group and marital status. A benefits catalogue holds a lunch subsidy and a fuel allowance. A support desk has a category for payroll questions.

Every one of those is a starting point you can change, and each tells you which workplace the defaults were shaped by.

What you can change

Leave types are configurable. Add your own, set the quota, set the paid and encashable flags, delete what does not apply. Nothing forces you to keep home working as a counted type.

Whatever you choose, the quota grid shows each person's used and allocated days for every type, home working included, so the allowance is a lookup rather than a debate.

Deciding which model you actually want

Before changing anything, work out what you need the record for. That settles the question faster than debating the principle.

If you need to know who is in the office on Thursday, a leave type is the wrong tool. That is a presence question and it wants a lighter answer.

If you need a defensible count of home-working days, because a policy limits them or somebody will ask at review time, a counted type gives you exactly that, with an approver and a date on every one.

And if home working is simply normal in your company, remove the type and stop generating requests nobody reads. A quota you do not enforce teaches people that requests are theatre.

A wider point about inherited defaults

Every product arrives holding somebody else's assumptions. Leave types are just the most visible example.

Expected hours default to forty a week. Attendance assumes a shift. The profile asks for fields your team may find odd or intrusive.

None of that is a problem if you look at it deliberately in the first fortnight. It becomes a problem when a default goes unexamined for a year and then gets quoted as policy.

So spend an hour on the configuration screens before rollout, with someone who knows how your company actually works. That hour is the cheapest one in the whole project.

What a leave catalogue says about a company

Read someone's list of leave types and you learn more about them than a values page would tell you.

A long list with small quotas describes a company that wants every absence named and counted. A short list with generous ones describes a company that would rather not track the reason.

Types that exist but are never used are worth noticing too. An unpaid category nobody has ever taken usually means the real answer is given some other way.

And the flags carry meaning of their own. Whether a type is paid, and whether unused days can be cashed out, are two decisions with consequences people feel directly.

Worth reading your own list occasionally, with that eye. Most were assembled gradually and describe a company from several years ago.