Leave Policy

A team of 15 people, each with 25 vacation days per year. That's 375 days — roughly 75 full work-weeks — of reduced capacity annually. Add sick leave (averaging 8-10 days per person in most European countries), and you're looking at nearly 100 weeks where someone on your team is unavailable.

Leave policy isn't just an HR document. It's one of the biggest variables in your scheduling math.

Capacity Impact by Season

Most agencies see predictable absence clusters. Summer (July-August) and year-end holidays (late December) can knock out 30-40% of a team simultaneously. If your resource scheduling doesn't account for these patterns, you'll consistently over-promise in Q3 and Q4.

The smart move is building leave patterns into your forecasting. Not guessing — actually looking at who has approved time off and adjusting available capacity accordingly. WrkSched does this automatically: approved time off reduces a person's available hours, and the capacity report reflects reality rather than the theoretical maximum.

Approval Modes and Team Size

There's no universal right answer on approval workflows. What works depends on context:

A 6-person studio where everyone sits together can run auto-approval. Conflicts are obvious. But a 40-person agency with overlapping project teams needs gatekeeping — two senior developers out the same week during a critical sprint isn't something you want discovered after the fact.

WrkSched lets you configure this per company. Auto-approve for teams that trust the process, admin approval for teams that need the checkpoint. Either way, public holidays layer in automatically based on each member's country, so the availability picture stays complete without manual entry for national days off.