Vacation scheduling

gtadopt

Our CEO has recently decided he may want to impose vacation scheduling in full-week increments only. Presently we require vacation to be taken in full days.

We are a high-tech engineering firm that is very project driven. He has a mindset that it would be easier to plan contigencies around an employee's full week vacation, and wants to do away with partial week absences.

I am skeptical that our employees will favorably receive this change. Do any of you have similar policies? If so, how is this policy received by your employees?

John

blw

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 10-21-03 AT 01:24PM (CST)[/font][p]We even allow vacation in hourly increments, which is cumbersome and I wouldn't mind it being full-day only. But I think week long only will have a very negative effect on morale. No ability to just have a long weekend. Bad idea.

Margaret Morford

I think you are going to have a revolt on your hands if you institute this policy. The closest I've seen any one do to this was to require that one week of vacation be taken together, leaving employees with the flexibility to use a day here and a day there with the rest of their vacation time. See if you can split the baby here and institute something like that. When I announced it, I would say that this change is to ease the burden on everyone who must help cover for the vacationing employee.

Margaret Morford
theHRedge
615-371-8200
[email]mmorford@mleesmith.com[/email]
[url]http://www.thehredge.net[/url]

marc

I agree with BLW. Bad idea. We ask people to schedule vacations out for the entire year. Of course not everyone can do it that way, but those that do, get the first shot at 3 and 4 day weekends, etc. There is still a lot of balancing making sure departments aren't short handed etc. We do require a 2 week notice for vacation requests after that (loosely enforced), but if a person waits, they always run the risk of not getting approval because of the impact on staffing, projects, etc.

mwild31

Well, if your CEO wants to implement the idea & it's not open for discussion - then it looks like your company will have to move to full week vacation requests. And, I would phrase it that way with the employees. Of course any time there is a change in policy & it affects employees somewhat negatively (freedom to use one day as opposed to blocking out a whole week) then you're going to have hard feelings. The best you can do in this situation, especially if the decision is already made, is draft up the new policy, outline the reasons for the shift & why the CEO thinks it's important & distribute it to the employees.

If there's still an opportunity to change the CEO's mind, then instead of his current course of action - have employees map out their vacation request at least six months in advance - determine your human capacity levels/vs. project capacity levels and allow only so many members to be gone during the peak times on a first come/skill level basis. Apply this measure consistently and allow for no overlaps. (For example - our employees request their vacation time for the year during the first 15 days in January. Those requests are then added to the the calendar. During the months of May through October, we can only allow one person per department to be gone at one time. Anyone submitting a vacation request after January 15th - must do so at a minimum of 30 days in advance of the request - if not, then it's automatically denied. If they do, then we look to the calendar and see if anyone else from the department is gone - if someone is, then it's denied - if it's not, then the request is considered & usually approved.) We've had a huge success with this policy & it's made our capacity planning infinitely easier to manage. Good luck either way!

marc

Wow MWild, as someone once said, "The devil is in the details!" Sounds like a complex policy, but I can see it gets the job done. Those last minute 3 day weekends would be in extreme jeopardy, but the ees would get the message once and then plan ahead accordingly. I like it.

mwild31

Hi Marc - it sounds more complicated in the retelling than in practice. We are a production company - so we know our production capacity levels at least 6 weeks in advance, since we've been in business for over 25 years - we have a definite history regarding upswings in capacity levels (May - October) that we can pretty much set a clock to. Finally, since we use Outlook, we are able to post everyone's vacation requests into Outlook & employees have access to the schedule for planning purposes. The only issue we ever ran into was during implementation - people weren't used to it. That has since past (it took about a month) & since it's applied consistently - no one has any further issues. It's been a godsend to us.

SandiF

We try to keep our employees happy. This would not. Does the CEO have to abide by the same policies?

MrCreosote

You mean I can't take a day off to take my daughter to the zoo? How about KiddieLand? How about the Friday when my friends are flying in to visit? I think the policy is ridiculous and I'd raise hell if my boss tried to introduce it. You know, I only need one day for the real estate closing, not a week.
(I suppose if you get a lot of personal days this might not be so bad.)

Hunter1

We do have labor agreements which have the rule that Margaret suggested, or a variation of it: all weeks but one have to be scheduled in full week increments, one week can be used by the day. It's been in practice for a long time, so it's well accepted; just the way life is. Another variation that we use is that all vacations must be scheduled by a certain date and full week vacations get priority over single days. Since we have seniority provisions in our labor agreements, that keeps the senior employee(s) from scheduling their single days around holidays.