We recently had a client situation where one of their employees went on agreed unpaid leave for a period which was then extended indefinably.   In the event that your business is faced with a similar situation we wanted to share this client story as these situations can be challenging to navigate.

Of course if your business if faced with a similar or different HR or Workplace Relations challenge, you can always take advantage of our Free HR consultation & strategic action plan by visiting ondemandhr.com.au/advice.

• The employee requested a period of unpaid leave to travel overseas to finalise matters for his divorce which was approved by the employer
• Following the completion of the agreed period, the employee had not returned from overseas and was unable to provide a return date
• The employer advised the employee that they were unwilling to agree to an indeterminate period because it would not allow them to rehire to replace the position in the event that the employee decided to return
• The employee was provided with one weeks notice to consider their position

This matter is yet to be resolved but there are a couple of interesting possibilities / considerations of the business involved:

• The employee has been engaged for more than 5 years and less than 10, so the best outcome would be for the employee to decide to resign from their employment as the NSW based employer would avoid having to pay pro-rata Long Service Leave. For reference, in NSW pro-rata Long Service Leave is required to be paid if an employee is dismissed for any other reason than serious and wilful misconduct.
• The other alternative is for the employer to proceed with a performance management process resulting in termination for refusing to follow a reasonable directive to attend work after the agreed unpaid leave period expires. Of course this course of action would require the employer to pay pro-rata long service leave.

So as you can see, sometimes working together with employees by approving things like unpaid leave can lead to some tricky and challenging HR & Workplace Relations situations even if they are as a result of no fault from either party.  If your business has an issue that would benefit from a free HR consultation and a strategic action plan, please visit ondemandhr.com.au/advice.

My name is Andrew Koleda, I am the operations manager at On Demand HR and we are looking forward to seeing you in the next update.