Block Leave

Created on Tuesday, 1 June 2010

Today I will be starting my block leave, which is from 1 June - 9 June. When I let my friends know about this block leave, they do not seems to know what this block leave is and its purpose.

In my company, every year, we need to take this mandatory block leave. It is a special annual leave whereby the leave is in a 'block' form and during this period, company will not contact you and vice versa. For a non-executive, you can need to take five working days while seven working days for executive.

If during your block leave period, you company contacted you for some critical reasons, you block leave is considered void. And when it is void, you need to re-take the block leave again. If you do not have enough annual leave for your block leave, you need to take unpaid leave for your block leave.

So, what is the purpose of it? The answer is risk management, to make sure that the company can still operate without you during your block leave period. Just imagine, a bank has this only one employee who supports a critical system and one fine day, he went missing in action. What will happened to his bank? Another word, by imposing block leave, this also ensure that there is replacement for every staff in the company.

Not all company impose block leave, only those from banking industry or those companies which need to support critical systems.