Setting Up a Leave Policy for a 10-Person Team From Scratch

Most small teams don't have a written leave policy — they have "just ask me." That works fine when it's one person approving one request at a time, right up until two people request the same week off and nobody notices until they're both gone, or one manager says yes to something another manager would have said no to, and now there's an inconsistency nobody can point to a rule to resolve.

You don't need an HR department to fix this. You need four decisions written down somewhere everyone can see, and one place where requests actually happen instead of a hallway conversation.

1. Decide the entitlement

How many leave days does someone get, over what period, and does it reset or carry over? This doesn't need to be complicated — "18 days a year, unused days don't carry over" is a complete policy. The point isn't generosity or strictness, it's that there's an actual number instead of a vague sense of fairness that changes depending on who's asking.

2. Decide how much notice is expected

Sick leave obviously can't require advance notice. Planned leave — a wedding, a trip — reasonably can. A simple rule like "planned leave needs 3 working days' notice, emergencies are handled case by case" removes the ambiguity around what counts as fair warning.

3. Decide who approves, and make sure it's consistent

If there's more than one manager, make sure they're applying the same standard — the actual policy from step 1 and 2, not their personal read on each situation. This is where writing it down matters most: a manager pointing to an actual written rule is a very different conversation than a manager making a judgment call on the spot.

4. Put every request in one visible place

This is the step almost every small team skips, and it's the one that actually prevents the "two people gone the same week" problem. A leave request that lives in a private chat message is invisible to everyone except the person who approved it. A leave request that lives in a shared calendar or workspace is visible to the whole team before it becomes a conflict, not after.

5. Revisit it once you can see the pattern

Once leave requests live in one place, you can actually see patterns — a particular week every year that gets requested heavily, or one person consistently over their entitlement. None of that is visible from memory. It only becomes visible once there's a record to look at.

TripleMask Tracker's Attendance & Leave keeps every request, approval, and calendar view in the same workspace as the rest of your team's work — see how it works, or try it free before you write your policy down.