Q: An employee has requested leave – with short notice – that their manager cannot approve as there are already three other team members on leave at the same time. The employee has told their manager that they have plans for those days that they cannot cancel. They also stated that if the leave is not approved, the employee will “take sickies anyway”.

Our current leave policy clearly states that annual leave requests will be considered based on operational requirements and key staff availability – and that approval must be obtained prior to taking annual leave. I intend to review and update our policies, including a requirement that if a leave request is not granted, an employee will be considered to be on unauthorised leave and it will therefore, be unpaid.

Can I enforce this now even though the policy does not include this requirement yet? What recourse do we have for employees who take the unauthorised leave?