Exactly. If I give you sufficient notice, 2 weeks is probably a good minimum, and no one else is taking off at that time, that’s a you problem if you can’t cover it. If your team is not structured such that you can honor PTO with sufficient notice, you are not offering PTO. You are lying about benefits.
Is was a manager of a help desk for a while and dealing with PTO shit was one of the main reasons I quit. We had 60 people working which was already insufficient to handle our call volume and they only allotted 2-3 slots on weekdays for PTO. We pretty much always had one or two people out for medical shit so in reality there was maybe one slot per day which basically made it impossible to get an actual vacation approved. On top of that it was hard to get OT approved so I couldn’t get someone else to cover it. I used to remind my people that consecutive absences only counted as one point on their attendance when I was telling them I couldn’t approve their requests. We ended up even more short staffed by people just going anyway then we’d have our executives barking at us about why we couldn’t meet the metrics they set. I built a report that showed how many people we would actually need to staff ourselves properly, even though we had a person whose job it was to do scheduling who should have been doing it, but when I presented it I was more or less ignored because it didn’t fit the narrative they were spinning to their bosses.
Yeah, I’ve worked places where I could tell exactly how many more man hours we were short, and I knew the managers were doing it deliberately for a bonus. It’s not for the workers, it’s not for the customers, it’s for shareholders.
As an employer (and thus an evil capitalist pigdog etc.) I’ve always applied the rule of the thumb that “twice the holiday duration as notice” is polite to the employer and your colleagues who will cover for you - so two days notice for a day off, two weeks notice for a week off, a month’s notice for two weeks off, etc.
“Polite” does not mean “mandatory” of course - circumstances can dictate that sometimes you have to break the rule of thumb and that’s fine.
Up to two weeks it makes sense, over 2 weeks it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Unless you have a really well organized boss or some software to help you out, they will forget and no matter if you have written proof you will appear as the one who left despite everything or you will have to fight for it or cancel because you reminded them just before leaving.
I’m lucky I’m in the EU so we have mandatory vacations
Exactly. If I give you sufficient notice, 2 weeks is probably a good minimum, and no one else is taking off at that time, that’s a you problem if you can’t cover it. If your team is not structured such that you can honor PTO with sufficient notice, you are not offering PTO. You are lying about benefits.
Is was a manager of a help desk for a while and dealing with PTO shit was one of the main reasons I quit. We had 60 people working which was already insufficient to handle our call volume and they only allotted 2-3 slots on weekdays for PTO. We pretty much always had one or two people out for medical shit so in reality there was maybe one slot per day which basically made it impossible to get an actual vacation approved. On top of that it was hard to get OT approved so I couldn’t get someone else to cover it. I used to remind my people that consecutive absences only counted as one point on their attendance when I was telling them I couldn’t approve their requests. We ended up even more short staffed by people just going anyway then we’d have our executives barking at us about why we couldn’t meet the metrics they set. I built a report that showed how many people we would actually need to staff ourselves properly, even though we had a person whose job it was to do scheduling who should have been doing it, but when I presented it I was more or less ignored because it didn’t fit the narrative they were spinning to their bosses.
Yeah, I’ve worked places where I could tell exactly how many more man hours we were short, and I knew the managers were doing it deliberately for a bonus. It’s not for the workers, it’s not for the customers, it’s for shareholders.
As an employer (and thus an evil capitalist pigdog etc.) I’ve always applied the rule of the thumb that “twice the holiday duration as notice” is polite to the employer and your colleagues who will cover for you - so two days notice for a day off, two weeks notice for a week off, a month’s notice for two weeks off, etc.
“Polite” does not mean “mandatory” of course - circumstances can dictate that sometimes you have to break the rule of thumb and that’s fine.
Up to two weeks it makes sense, over 2 weeks it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Unless you have a really well organized boss or some software to help you out, they will forget and no matter if you have written proof you will appear as the one who left despite everything or you will have to fight for it or cancel because you reminded them just before leaving. I’m lucky I’m in the EU so we have mandatory vacations
Is “owning a calendar” really the bar we’re setting for being really well organized these days?