Encouraging employees to take their holiday allowance is usually easy. However, in these strange times, with overseas trips largely off the menu, workers have accrued big blocks of unused leave.
Totted up, these untaken days forced the FTSE 250 outsourcer Capita, which employs 60,000, to report a non-cash charge of £42.6m at its interim results this month. Overall holiday allowance also increased because Capita gave extra days off to staff earning more than £70,000 who took pay cuts.
Some of this was merely unfortunate, but there was some bad planning, too. Capita’s inability to work out the proper rate at which staff should accrue holiday time highlighted the historic underinvestment in the company. Until recently, it did not have the technology, but has now invested