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One of the biggest challenges that working parents face is juggling professional demands with family life. This has a knock-on impact for their employers too, as there’s always a race to book time off during the school holidays.

If you’re a department manager or work in HR, you will often field questions about annual leave. Holiday entitlements and procedures are one of the most asked-about areas during interviews, and the queries don’t stop once staff are on board.

Sick leave is big business for company bosses; in the UK alone, staff illness costs employers £77 billion in lost productivity each year. While most of these absences can’t helped, there are sometimes less than honest reasons that employees want to take a day off.

Managing staff can be a company’s biggest challenge, with unplanned absences, last-minute holiday requests and calendar clashes often impacting productivity. Most bosses would like to know exactly where their staff will be at any point in time – but short of a crystal ball, there’s no way of knowing this.

Co-ordinating staff leave can be challenging at the best of times, but what happens when your team members don’t work a fixed number of hours? The sad reality is that many people in irregular employment have their holiday allocations underestimated – or receive no paid holiday at all – despite being entitled to annual leave.

When a candidate comes to interview at your company, there’s a standard set of questions they want answered.

How does a fast-paced digital marketing agency ensure that staff holiday doesn’t slow down project delivery times?

Finding the right person for the job is an ongoing challenge for business owners, so when the right person comes along, the idea of them taking leave can sit uncomfortably. However, we all know employees can’t be on call 24/7,365 days a year.

We’ve all faced the headache of trying to squeeze in a trip to the doctor or dentist around work. Not every appointment can wait until an evening or weekend, yet it somehow doesn’t feel justified taking time out of the office.

Staff leave is often taken for granted within companies; once you’ve put a framework in place, it tends to run itself – right? However, increasing evidence is showing that the cost of not paying attention to the way holiday is managed is much greater than most businesses realise.