Christmas Eve & New Year's Eve

memiller

Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve are not normal paid holidays for us. Since they land on Monday this year, I was wondering how many companies will be closed this year on the above two days. Does anyone know of a survey that was or will be taken...other than my own?

Margaret Morford

I don't know what type of business you are, but I would call your customers and see how many of them will be open and needing service. If you are a retail business, se what the stores around you are doing or call your local competitors and see what they are doing. Hope that helps.

Margaret Morford
theHRedge

WD

You could implement a "floating" holiday in which some employees could use it for one day and other employees could use for the other. This gives a little more flexibility during the holidays for employees and at least gives you a skeleton staff for both days. It seems the norm would be to have Christmas Eve off. However, we have found that some employees prefer to be off New Year's Eve rather than Christmas Eve.

cedupree

This year we will be given Christmas Eve off as a paid holiday. However we will be open on New Year's Eve. Anyone who has earned vacation can take December 31st if they so desire. Think how much work can get done if other people take off on New Year's Eve.

ahoffert

We are going to be offering those 2 days off as paid holidays. We are doing this in lieu of summer hours for the month of August this year (last year we closed all the offices at 2:00 pm every Friday in August). But, one thing I would caution you about is that we explained to employees that they would receive 2 extra floating holidays to be used in the month of December (we normally offer 1 floating holiday for people to use at their choosing anytime during the fiscal year). The reason we made the 2 days floating holidays was to avoid any reference to religious discrimination with regard to Christmas. All "mainstream" winter holidays fall in the month of December (Christmas -12/25, Hanukah - 12/10, and Kwanza 12/26).

So, if you do offer it, I would certainly suggest offering the day or days as "floating holidays" so at the very minimum nobody is offended.