Managing Leave Requests Across Multiple Time Zones

When your team consists of an engineer in London, a designer in San Francisco, a product manager in Singapore, and a support specialist in Sydney, leave management becomes exponentially more complex. Everyone works on different public holiday calendars, operates under different labor laws, and has different cultural expectations about time off.

The approval process you use for a single-location team breaks down immediately. This guide will show you how to manage leave across multiple time zones without drowning in complexity or creating fairness issues.

The Time Zone Calendar Problem

In a traditional office, "Friday off" has clear meaning. In a globally distributed team, "Friday off" could mean:

• Friday 12:01 AM to 11:59 PM in the employee's local timezone
• Friday business hours (9 AM - 5 PM) in the employee's local timezone
• Friday in the company headquarters' timezone (which might be Thursday or Saturday for the employee)

Without explicit definitions, you'll have employees taking leave on different days than they intended, managers approving requests they misunderstood, and payroll confusion about which days to deduct.

The solution: always reference dates in the employee's local timezone and display them in that timezone in all systems. If someone in Tokyo requests Friday October 15th off, that means October 15th in Tokyo, not October 15th in New York.

Public Holidays Are Local, Not Global

Your London employee gets 8 UK public holidays. Your New York employee gets 10-11 US federal holidays. Your Singapore employee gets 11 Singapore public holidays. None of these overlap completely, and expecting everyone to work on your headquarters' non-holidays while taking your headquarters' holidays creates resentment.

Implement location-specific holiday calendars. Each employee's leave balance and available working days should reflect their local public holiday schedule.

Tools like BetterFlow support multi-country holiday calendars automatically, applying the correct public holidays based on each employee's work location without requiring manual configuration.

Coverage Planning Across Time Zones

Traditional coverage planning says "we need at least 3 developers available during business hours." Global teams need to rethink this in terms of timezone overlaps.

Define coverage requirements based on overlap windows rather than absolute hours:

• "We need at least 2 backend engineers during the EMEA/Americas overlap window (1 PM - 5 PM UTC)"
• "We need at least 1 support person covering each 8-hour segment of the 24-hour day"
• "We need design review capacity available during the Asia/EMEA overlap and the Americas/Asia overlap"

This ensures critical collaboration windows have sufficient staffing while not requiring 24/7 availability from everyone.

Fair Leave Allocation Across Regions

Different countries have different statutory leave entitlements. UK employees are entitled to 28 days (including public holidays), German employees get 20-30 days depending on contract, US employees have no federal requirement. How do you create fair policies across these differences?

Three approaches companies use:

• Comply with local law only: Each location gets statutory minimum (cheapest but creates perceived unfairness)
• Equalize total PTO: Everyone gets the same total days regardless of location (expensive in high-statutory countries)
• Match to highest standard: Everyone gets the best deal available in any location where you operate (most expensive but easiest to communicate)

Document your approach clearly. Nothing breeds resentment faster than employees discovering their colleague in another country has better leave benefits for the same role.

Conclusion

Managing leave across time zones requires rethinking assumptions that work for single-location teams. Dates must be timezone-aware, public holidays must be location-specific, coverage must be defined in terms of overlap windows, and approval workflows must function asynchronously.

Build systems and policies that respect local legal requirements and cultural norms while maintaining fairness and operational consistency. Done well, global leave management becomes a competitive advantage in hiring and retention.