Table of Contents
🗃️North Macedonia HR
🤝Onboarding your new employee
🧑💻 Managing your remote team
⚖️ Policies and Legal
🗃️North Macedonia HR
We use Zoho People as our HR platform
⏱️ Track the teams working hours (check in/out)
🏖️ Manage and calculate vacation days and other holiday types
📝 Track staff requests such as IT support, check/confirm holiday balances and check any HR related queries
Approval process with clients own HR systems:
Approvals such as holiday, working on public holidays and sickness.
1️⃣Requests are first made in the client system
2️⃣Confirmation from that system is used to request in Zoho
Pay and Benefits
📢 IMPORTANT to note that North Macedonian salaries are always discussed in Net terms.
Payroll
Payroll schedule is run at the end of the month ready to pay employees by the 10th of each month.
Any bonuses or expenses must be confirmed with Talkr by 25th of the previous month (email Marc or Ben)
Overtime, public holidays and bonuses
Your team member(s) are either following the UK or MK public holiday schedule. If they work on a day they are entitled to have off they will be paid extra.
Any overtime, or to work a public holiday, must first be agreed between the team member and their manager as you will be charged extra for these (see below)
It is not mandatory to give your team members additional bonuses. However, an employer can grant voluntary bonuses that will be taxed as salary (more information on this can be found in '4.4.1 Policies and Legal')
Mandatory and Talkr funded benefits
⚕️ Health Care ♿ Pension fund and Disability Insurance
💵 Unemployment Insurance 🏥 After 6 months: Private medical insurance
Statutory Time Off
💵 Paid Time Off
Full-time employees are entitled to 20 working days of paid time off (PTO) a year. For every 5 years of work experience the employee receives 1 extra day (for more details on this see '4.1 Policies and Legal' below)
📆 Public Holidays
North Macedonia typically celebrates 11 national holidays plus up to 5 religious holidays. Employees are paid 1.5x salary if working a North Macedonian public holiday.
🇲🇰 National public holidays include:
New Year's Day
Orthodox Christmas Eve
Easter Monday (Orthodox)
Eid al-Fitr
Labour Day
Saint Cyrlic and Methodius Day
Republic Day
Independence Day
Day of People's Uprising
Day of Macedonian Revolutionary Struggle
Saint Kliment Ohridski's Day
Religious Holidays
As a follower of the Orthodox or Muslim faith an employee has up to 5 extra religious holidays (Orthodox). An employee can only follow one of these faiths extra holidays.
🤒 Sick Leave
Employees are entitled to paid sick leave for up to 30 days. This leave is paid at different rates.
📢 IMPORTANT: If sick for more than 2 consecutive days an employee needs to provide a medical certificate.
To note: for 1-30 days the employer pays 100% gross salary. The government health fund takes 30%-10% dependant on the sick leave period.
*More detail on Sick Leave can be found below in '4.4.2 Policies and Legal'
🤝Onboarding your new employee
Before your new employee starts
Welcome the employee to your team with an email and call if you can.
The email (to their personal email address) can include:
👉 What your employee can expect on their first day
👉 How you will first contact them once they have started
👉 Any documentation they can familiarise themselves with before they start
👉 When they will gain access to their email accounts so that on day 1 they have this already setup and can communicate with you
👉 Share their training schedule including what you are going to cover, days and times
Getting your new employee email access
For help on getting this setup please reach out to us.
If you have a systems admin person they will be able to set any new email accounts etc. up for your team.
First few weeks and training
Employee day 1.
For the first 2 hours the employee will be completing their onboarding with Talkr. They will be shown how to use the internal CRM system, signing any documentation and logging in to their new laptop
Your employee laptop will be ready and set up for them to use. Their laptops will already have any specific software you have requested installed on them
The employee should be advised on how best to reach out to their team leader / line manager etc. and encouraged to ask any questions they may have
Week 1 and training
The training is completely up to you, the client. Talkr leaves the amount of training and how this is completed in your hands. Please let us know if you would like any assistance or see below for tips on how to train your remote team
Ensure there are regular check-ins with your employee. In their first week we advise a daily 10 minute catch up where the employee is encouraged to speak openly and honestly
By the end of week 1 the employee should have met all or most of the contacts they will be working with
🧑💻 Managing your remote team
Remote team training tips:
The training should be as interactive as possible; get your employee to use your platform, shadow somebody else plus a Q+A, short and to the point video tutorials
FAQs, How-to’s, Video tutorials etc. we find it better to air on the side of too much documentation then too little
Keep all documentation in one easy to find place so you remote employee can easily refer to this without needing to reach out to you to find anything
Day to day communication
As with any remote employee your ability to communicate with one another is very important. We recommend using communication platforms such as:
Slack
MS Teams
Google workspace
Integrating your new employee
Include your employee in things such as:
Company updates/meetings
Relevant team meetings
Company socials
We encourage you come and visit your employee(s) in Skopje to build and maintain that relationship
⚖️ Policies and Legal
Holiday entitlement
4.1 North Macedonian holiday entitlement
The calendar year starts on the 1st. of January and lasts till 31st of December. For one calendar year employees are granted a minimum of 20 days of vacation.
In the first 6 months of their employment, they will accrue 2 days a month.
Employees are required to use at least 12 days during one calendar year and have the option to transfer up to 8 vacation days to be used until the 30th of June the following year.
At the beginning of the next calendar year (providing that they have been in the company longer than 6 months), every employee is granted an additional 20 vacation days, that they only start to use after they have used all the remaining days from the previous calendar year. • In case the vacation days from the previous year are not used, they will expire on the 1st of July.
Holiday entitlement based on work experience
In North Macedonia an employee receives extra holiday days and benefits if they have over 5 years of working experience. The number of years' experience is taken from the employment office and not the individual employers, so it accounts for their total work experience to date.
5+ years' experience = 1 extra holiday day accrued (21) and allowed to carry over up to 9 days to the following year
10+ years' experience = 2 extra holiday days accrued (22) and allowed to carry over up to 10 days to the following year
4.2 Public holiday entitlement
Your employees will either work to a North Macedonian or UK public holiday schedule. This is to be agreed before the contract with the employee is signed.
If the employee works a public holiday that they are entitled to they will receive additional pay
Working a public holiday needs to be agreed between the employee and client and applied for in the Talkr HR system
An explanation of how holiday is accrued (as it's a bit complicated...):
Using the 1st of May 2021 as an example start date.
During the first 6 months of their employment employees are entitled to 2 vacation days each month, accumulated as below:
1st of June = 2 vac. days
1st of July = 4 vac. days
1st of August = 6 vac. days
1st of September = 8 vac. days
1st of October = 10 vac. days
On the 1st of November they would be completing the first 6 months of their employment and they’ll be entitled to additional 10 days, bringing them to their 20 vacation days for the calendar year 2021. The policy for transferring days is the same as explained above, meaning out of these 20 days they need to use 12 of them until the 31st of December and they can transfer a maximum of 8 days which they can use until the end of June 2022.
If someone starts after the 1st of July, they will also get 2 vacation days per month until the end of the year, which they can use until the 30th of June the following year. And at the beginning of the next calendar year – they still receive 2 vacation days per month (these days are part of that year’s balance) until they accumulate 6 months in the company, at which time the remaining vacation days are added to their balance, bringing them to the 20 days for that calendar year.
Joined in 2nd half of the calendar year:
Here the example start date will be the 1st of September 2021.
Again, during the first 6 months of their employment employees are entitled to 2 vacation days each month, accumulated as below:
1st of October = 2 vac. days
1st of November = 4 vac. days
1st of December = 6 vac. days
This is where the difference comes in – these 6 days that they have accumulated in 2021 are counted as part of their 2021 balance and can be transferred and used up by the end of June 2022.
Once the new year comes around, they’ll continue accumulating their days 2 each month until they complete their first 6 months:
1st of January = 2 days
1st of February = 4 days
On the 1st of March 2022 they’d be completing their first 6 months of employment in the company and they’ll be entitled to additional 16 days, bringing them to their 20 vacation days for the calendar year 2022.The policy for transferring days is the same as explained above, meaning out of these 20 days they need to use 12 of them until the 31st of December 2022 and they can transfer a maximum of 8 days which they can use until the end of June 2023.
In case of an increased workload, the employee can be asked not to use their vacation days, but in such cases, those days must be paid to the employee in full.
4.3 Additional leave types
Other types of leave entitlement your team receives:
Apart from the vacation days entitlement, there are other leave types that an employee is entitled to over the course of one calendar year. The minimum balances for these leave types are as follows:
