@stu81uk You need to look into the specifics of the accrued public holiday: your example, the 6th of January is not a bank holiday everywhere in Germany, but mostly just in the Soutch (Bavaria). So if your company has various venues you might want to be careful with that.

Also it is tricky to “swap” a holiday, because just because somebody has to work on a bank holiday, does not make it a non-bank-holiday. Actually you need to keep it as a bank holiday to be able to pay allowances and other legally required extra pays … 

So I wouldnt recommend swapping the days but just give the employee a different working hour type.

Does that answer your question?

Hi Nina, 

Thanks for the response. Perhaps i wasn't specific enough...We have a team in Asia and they are all on a specific public accrual policy. The team are not using the attendance time tracking. The supervisor / manager is wanting to know if he can assign specific employees effective working hours on those public holiday days if we cannot swap them. I / we totally understand that the public holidays are paid for and should ideally not be swapped however is there a possibility to swap those days despite the assigned policy to the team? If there is no possibility to swap what would you recommend here ? ...as we really need to be able to swap public holiday days for individual employees in the same team / department. Again, thanks for the help and hope you can guide us here. Regards

Hi @stu81uk,

Public holidays are always related to the offices and so indirectly to the employees who are assigned to the offices. 

If you theoretically want to assign individual public holidays to individual employees, you would need to create individual offices for those employees to really “swap” the public holidays in the system. 

As public holidays only affect the absence when you are not tracking attendance, there maybe a workaround for you:

You can create a new absence type called something like “work on public holiday” in the settings of that absence type you need to set Consider time tracked during absences of this type as overtime? to No. After that, you can assign the absence to the holidays the employee should work. Kindly note that this is just an informational absence type, you won’t have any calculations or effect here. 

Would that work for you? Otherwise, could you please point out why exactly it is so important to swap the holidays when you do not track attendance, just to make sure I do have the best workaround for you.

P.S.: We also offer an all English Personio Community when you navigate to community.personio.com - here you can get the input of more people speaking English. 

Have a lovely day 
Marc