Leave allowance calculator
Every agent's leave has to go somewhere. Enter the headcount, the entitlement and the shape of your year, and the calculator gives the leave days you must place, the average number of agents off on any day, the share of the team that means, and how many slots to open per week in peak, normal and quiet periods so the requirement curve, not first-come-first-served, decides where leave lands.
9.6% of headcount.
- Leave slots per normal week
- 47.3
- Leave slots per peak week
- 37.8
- Leave slots per quiet week
- 59.1
- Leave days to place
- 2,500
- Shrinkage from leave
- 9.6%
Agent-days.
Show the working
- Leave to place = 100 agents × 25 days = 2500 agent-days a year.
- Spread over 52 × 5 = 260 working days, that is 9.6 agents off on an average day, 9.6% of the team.
- Weighting weeks by the inverse of their volume (peak 0.80, normal 1, quiet 1.25): 37.8 leave days in a peak week, 47.3 in a normal week, 59.1 in a quiet week.
- Per day that is 7.6, 9.5 and 11.8 agents off. The shrinkage from leave alone is 9.6%.
Doing this for every interval of the week? Pebble WFM computes the requirement from your forecast and builds the roster. Free month, no card needed.
How the leave allowance is calculated
Multiply headcount by entitlement and you have the agent-days of leave that must be taken somewhere in the year. Divide by the working days in the year and you have the average number of agents off on any given day, and the share of the team that means. That share is the leave component of shrinkage, and it is the same whether you plan it or not.
The planning question is where those days land. First-come-first-served puts them in summer and December, exactly where volume is highest for many centres. Weighting weeks by the inverse of their relative volume moves slots into quiet weeks: at 0.8 times average volume a quiet week gets 25 per cent more slots than a normal one, and a peak week at 1.25 times gets 20 per cent fewer.
The result is a number of slots to open per week. Publish them, let agents book against them, and release unused slots as the weeks approach. The requirement curve, not the order requests arrived in, then decides how many people are off.
Frequently asked questions
- What percentage of agents can be on leave at once?
- Whatever the entitlement forces, on average: 25 days over 260 working days is 9.6 per cent of the team off every day. Rules of thumb of 10 to 15 per cent come from exactly this arithmetic. The choice is not the percentage but its distribution across the year.
- Should public holidays be included?
- Not in the entitlement, because everyone is off on the same day and no slot is needed. They do belong in shrinkage, where the shrinkage calculator counts them separately.
- How do I handle agents who do not take their full entitlement?
- Plan for the full entitlement anyway. Untaken leave accumulates and is taken later, usually in the least convenient quarter, or paid out. A plan that assumes people forgo leave is a plan that is short in March.
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