Who should approve leave requests, and in what order? Department-based approval chains, the HR step, overlap checks and a backup plan for the work left behind.
Approving a leave request looks simple on paper: the employee asks, the manager approves. In practice the request gets lost in email, the approver is on leave that week, three people from the same team have booked the same dates, and nobody has picked up the work the employee left half-finished. The problem is rarely the leave itself; it is the design of the leave process.
This article explains how to build a healthy leave approval workflow, why the approval chain should be derived from your department structure, and how to plan backup cover so work does not stall while someone is away. For the details of balance calculation, see our annual leave calculation guide.
Four qualities of a good leave approval workflow
Whatever the size of the organisation, a working leave process answers four questions without hesitation:
- Ownership: Who approves this request, and who is next in line?
- Visibility: Which step is the request waiting at right now?
- Context: Can the approver see the employee's balance and the team's other leave when deciding?
- Record: Who decided what, and when, and can it be traced later?
If even one of these goes unanswered, the process starts to depend on individuals. "I told my manager in person" comes back later as leave that was never deducted from the balance, or a final payment calculated wrongly.
Derive the approval chain from your department structure
Keeping a separate list of approvers for each leave type creates a structure that goes stale the moment the organisation changes. A more sustainable approach is to derive the approval order from the department tree: the head of the employee's unit is the first step and, where needed, the head of the unit above is the second.
In HibritİK Leave & Overtime Management the approval chain is built from your department tree in exactly this way. When you update the department structure, the approval flow follows; appointing a new manager does not mean fixing a separate approver list by hand. Requests move through managers in order and the relevant person is notified at each step.
How many steps are enough?
More steps look like more control, but they also mean longer waits and diluted responsibility. As a rule of thumb:
- For short, routine leave, a single manager approval is usually enough.
- For long leave or requests that fall in critical periods, the view of the next level up can be valuable.
- You should be able to explain in writing why each step exists; a step you cannot explain is one to remove.
When to add an HR step
Managers are responsible for planning the work; HR is responsible for applying the rules correctly. These are different perspectives. For leave types that require documents, cases where the balance has been adjusted manually, or requests that affect payroll such as unpaid leave, having HR see the request as the final step catches errors early.
In HibritİK you can add an optional HR step to the approval chain. The manager decides whether the timing works for the team, and HR checks that the request follows the rules and the record is complete. If you have made an attachment mandatory for a leave type, the document is uploaded with the request, which also makes HR's job easier.
Catch overlaps at the moment of request
The most overlooked aspect of leave approval is that requests which are reasonable one by one can, together, leave a team unable to function. Each manager judges the request in front of them; few people see how many colleagues are off in the same week.
HibritİK checks for overlapping leave when the request is made, and the team leave calendar shows who is off and when on a single screen. Employees see their balance and any overlaps as soon as they enter a request on web or mobile, and managers decide with the same context. The "could you move this to another week?" conversation then happens during the request, not after approval.
Practical tip: share peak periods (year-end close, start of season, the days before public holidays) with teams at the start of the year. When people know these periods, fewer requests run into overlap warnings.
Backup planning: the invisible half of leave approval
Approving leave also means approving how the work will run during that time. Leave approved without a backup plan ends either with the employee being phoned on holiday or with work piling up, and both defeat the purpose of the leave.
1. Identify critical roles and their backups
Every team has work that depends on one person: a key customer account, a payment instruction, a production line's shift plan. List this work and name at least one backup for each item. Make sure the backup has the access and knowledge to do it before any leave starts.
2. Do not schedule a role and its backup off together
A role and its backup being away in the same week is one of the most common planning mistakes. When you check the team leave calendar, look at these pairings, not just the headcount.
3. Handover notes and open work
A short handover note before longer leave is a good habit: ongoing work, pending decisions, who to stay in touch with. If you track tasks in HibritİK Task & Project Management, updating the assignee of tasks that must keep moving and leaving the absent person as informed puts the handover on record.
4. Check the backup's workload
The backup still has their own work. If the extra work overloads them, the problem has simply moved from one person to another. The workload screen compares planned hours with capacity per person and week, which helps you see whether the handover is realistic.
What happens when the approver is away?
The approval chain is itself subject to leave. Write down the rule in advance for periods when a manager will be away for a long time: who reviews requests in that period, and who to turn to in an emergency? Because the approval order comes from the department tree, keeping the structure up to date is the key step for permanent changes of manager. For temporary absences, a clear delegation rule in your policy prevents requests from sitting in "pending approval" for weeks.
Decision times and communication rules
- Set a reasonable response time for requests and share it with managers.
- When a request is declined, explain why and, where possible, suggest other dates.
- Write the expected notice period into your leave policy so requests do not arrive at the last minute.
- Approved leave is deducted from the balance and appears on the team calendar; do not keep a separate list by hand.
Setup checklist
- Review the department tree with up-to-date manager information.
- Decide which leave types need an HR step.
- Configure document, half-day and per-request limit settings for each leave type.
- Add public holidays and company-specific days to the company calendar.
- Prepare the list of critical roles and their backups.
- Put the delegation rule for absent managers in writing.
- Show employees how to submit a request and where to see their balance.
Common mistakes
- Keeping the approver list separate from the org chart and forgetting to update it.
- Noticing overlaps only after the leave has started.
- Approving leave for a role and its backup in the same week.
- Calling an employee repeatedly because no handover was done.
- Not recording verbal approvals in the system.
Leave approval with HibritİK
In HibritİK, leave requests pass through a multi-step approval chain built from your department tree, optionally with an HR step; overlaps are caught at request time and the team leave calendar makes planning easier. Employees can submit requests and check their balance from the mobile app. To set up your own approval flow, start a 14-day free trial or see the pricing page.