Holiday Swap: move a company holiday to a date that works for you

Easter Monday: Apr 6 → Apr 10

That one line is the whole feature. An employee who does not observe a company holiday picks another date for it. April 6 becomes a normal working day for that person. April 10 becomes a paid day off. Nobody else's calendar moves.

Until now a holiday in Teamtopia was office-wide and nothing else: everyone in the office got the same day off, and teams that span countries, faiths and calendars settled the exceptions in a spreadsheet or in a manager's head. Holiday Swap is now a leave type of its own — with a versioned policy, an approval flow, and its own marks on the team calendar.

What a swap actually changes

• The original holiday becomes a regular working day for that one employee. The office calendar keeps it for everyone else.
• The replacement date becomes a paid day off for them.
• No balance moves. A swap does not accrue anything and does not draw anything down — vacation and sick-leave balances are untouched.
• If the employee already had an absence on the new date, the swap takes priority and that day is not deducted from their vacation or sick balance.
• Payroll and the public API count the moved day where it now is, not where it was.

You decide what can move, how far, and how often

Holiday Swap is an optional leave section in office policies, with four settings:

• Swappable holidays — a tick list of the office's holidays. Only what you tick can be moved; an empty list means nothing is swappable yet.
• Max swaps per year — optional, with no upper bound. Leave the limit off and there is no yearly cap. The count runs against the year of the original holiday, so a replacement that lands in January still uses the previous year's allowance.
• Swap window — same calendar year, within ±30 days of the original holiday, or a custom window of 1–90 days before or after.
• Approval — "Requests must be approved by a manager". Switch it off and a swap applies the moment it is submitted.

It behaves like every other policy section: an effective-from date, a version history, and employee notifications when rules change. Employees never read the settings — they read the digest generated from them: "The new date must be within 30 days before or after the original holiday." "You can move up to 2 holiday(s) per year." "A manager has to approve each swap before it takes effect."

What the employee does

Add Request → Holiday swap. Each row is one holiday: its name, its official date, and a date picker.

The picker blocks instead of warning. Dates outside the policy window, days the office does not work, other holidays, the original date itself, and dates already chosen elsewhere in the same form are all disabled in the calendar. A holiday that already has a swap shows "Swapped to: Apr 10" and its picker is off. The refusal never arrives as an error after submit, because the invalid choice cannot be made.

Under the list, Your swapped holidays keeps a running summary — Easter Monday: Apr 6 → Apr 10 — and the year appears automatically when the two dates fall in different ones. Several holidays can go in one submit; each one is then approved or declined on its own.

Where the swap shows up

• Team calendar, both dates. On the official holiday, the popover now splits the office: "Observed by 12 employees" / "Swapped by 3 employees", with names and their new dates. On the replacement date the person is shown as away, marked as a swapped holiday, with Apr 6 → Apr 10.
• Google Calendar. A "Holiday swaps" checkbox per synced calendar. It is off by default, so no new events appear in an existing integration until you turn it on.
• Slack. Its own notification group — submitted, approved, declined and the matching cancellations — with [holiday] and [holiday_date] placeholders alongside the usual ones.

When the rules change afterwards

Remove a holiday from the office calendar and the approved swaps attached to it go with it — the employee gets an email and a Slack message saying that date is a working day again, rather than discovering it on a Monday morning.

Policy edits work the other way round: untick a holiday or lower the yearly cap and existing approved swaps stay as they are. The new version governs new requests only.

Turning it on

Open your office policy, switch on Holiday Swap under the additional leave types, tick the holidays you are willing to move, set the window and the cap, and decide whether managers approve. The tab stays out of the employees' request form until at least one holiday is marked swappable — so you can set the rules first and open it when you are ready.