birthdays and funerals
System
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Looking for some ideas as to how others handle office birthday parties and funerals of employee family members. Both present opportunties for perceived inequities and hurt feelings. Without over-legislating, how does one prevent one employee's parents funeral from attracting the entire office, and another's attracting no one, etc?
Comments
For birthday's everyone gets a card signed by the office, a lunch, and a cake.
For funeral's everyone gets a card signed by the office and we send flowers to the funeral home IF the information is provided.
Same for babies and etc...
Honestly though, once you start doing something for one person, you have to do it for all. It is the only way you can avoid the hurt feelings.
I would document the process once you finalize it, that way if a group of ee's decide that they want to do something more, than the ee who didn't get something more can't complain b/c it wasn't a company procedure.
Funerals - naturally, we give the employee whose relative has died paid time off (three days) and should anyone else know their relatives and want to go, they would need to use vacation time. We've had very few active employees die, but exempts who worked with them and member of top management will attended.
We have not really had a problem since we cut back on the multiple departmental parties.
Welcome to the forum.
It is a difficult task to tell ees they have to like other ees or show respect to their deceased. It is a little bit like telling your kids they must like a specific child. It just does not happen. Hurt feelings arise from such a variety of sources that you will drive yourself nuts trying to achieve some sort of equity or fairness standard that everyone must meet. These things will happen one way or the other and hurt feelings will arise or they will not. Stay out of it as much as possible and try for the generic party idea. Go with the card for the bereaved. Even flowers get judged for being 'not as nice as so and so's flowers.'
I don't know either because it's never been an issue for us. It's not often that employees attend the funeral of a co-worker's parent, usually only the funeral of an employee. I don't see how a company can monitor or "legislate" who attends based on a numbers system. Either they feel the need to attend or they don't, I guess. Why are they attending anyway? For support, or did they know the parent(s)?
Birthdays are handled within departments. My department does a cake or something the person particulary likes, and usually spend about 20 minutes partaking and talking and then back to business. Some departments do a department lunch and reserve one of the conference rooms. Again, it's never been time consuming or an issue.
Elizabeth
That being said, at my company each department takes care of their own birthday celebrations. For the adminstration/HR departments, we have birthday cards & send one around for the birthday boy/girl & everyone signs. The card is put in an envelope & my assistant tapes a "T.E.A.M" lollipop on it & gives it to the person. We stopped providing cakes as people refused to sing the Happy Birthday song - so everyone was just standing around and looking at each other. For some birthdays - people go a little over the top (40th, 50th, etc.) but it's usually frowned upon because if you do it for one, you have to do it for all - why discriminate against the 32 year-olds? If a bunch of co-workers want to take the birthday boy/girl out to lunch - great! - however, we don't pay for it.
As to funerals - man, this is the last place I would want to press my insecurities over how popular I am or not with my co-workers. Our bereavement leave covers the time away for the employee & if you're asked by a co-worker to attend a funeral - go and if you're not asked - don't sweat it. I sure don't want to get into the middle of that situation & any employee that whines - would know my feelings on the issue right away.
Please don't take my response personally & never post again - I know it's a serious question you have - it's just one aspect of HR that truly makes my stomach turn.
Funny you should post about the funerals though. Recently we had a situation where one of our server's father passed away suddenly. This server had to take off work for a week to go to Washington state to bring back the body. He also had to take care of all the funeral arrangements as his mother takes care of his disabled brother full time (parents were divorced). In light of the events, the staff of the restaurant (not management mind you) took it upon themselves to take up a collection to offset that one week without pay. Another server got upset because when her father died in April, the staff did not do the same for her. It was a sticky situation and we were stuck because we can't help what the staff will do or not do amongst themselves. Generally, the restaurants themselves will take care of doing something for the staff when there is a death. For management or corporate, we will send a card and flowers to the funeral home and sometimes even deliver some food.
Johnette
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