The sandwich rule is not unfair. Applying it inconsistently is.

The sandwich rule counts intervening weekly offs and holidays as leave when an employee takes leave on both sides of them. Take Friday and Monday, and the Saturday and Sunday between are charged too.

Employers adopt it for a straightforward reason: without it, an employee can convert two days of leave into a four-day absence, repeatedly, and a team that needs coverage cannot plan around it. That is a reasonable position.

So why does it produce so much bad feeling?

Almost never because of the rule. Nearly always because of two failures around it.

• It is applied inconsistently, enforced for one employee, waived for another by a manager acting in good faith, and both outcomes become known.
• It is discovered afterwards, the employee applies for two days, sees two days deducted from the balance shown at the time, and finds four days gone on the payslip.

An employee who knows a Friday-and-Monday will cost four days can decide whether it is worth it. An employee who finds out afterwards has been charged for a decision they were not allowed to make.

What a leave policy has to state

Whether or not you adopt the rule, four things need to be written down, because each is a question someone will eventually ask:

1. 1Whether the rule applies at allSome employers do not adopt it. Saying so explicitly is better than silence, which gets interpreted as either answer.
2. 2Which leave types it applies toEarned leave and casual leave are often treated differently, and sick leave usually differently again.
3. 3What counts as interveningWeekly offs, declared holidays, or both. A holiday falling on a weekly off needs its own line.
4. 4Who may vary it, and on what groundsIf nobody can, say so. If somebody can, name the authority, because an unwritten discretion is the inconsistency employees actually object to.

Enforcement should be mechanical, not managerial

Once the policy is written, the application of it should not be a decision anyone makes. Configured as a policy setting, the rule applies identically to every employee, and, this is the part that matters, the outcome is visible at the point of applying rather than on the payslip.

In HRMagix, leave balances are computed from the accrual rule rather than stored, so the balance an employee sees when applying is the same balance the approving manager sees and the same one payroll uses. The employee sees the real cost of a Friday-and-Monday before they commit to it.

That removes the grievance almost entirely, and it does so without softening the rule. The complaint was never really about the two days.