Work is stressful and busy lately. Typical year-end crunch stuff. The difference this year though is that employees are no longer allowed to carry over unused vacation days. We now have the ‘use it or lose it’ policy. So in prior years, if you had a deadline at year end, you could forgo using a couple of your days in order to get your stuff done, and just carry them over. Now we don’t have that option.
It’s kind of coming to a head now, too. We have people with 2, 3, even 4 weeks left to use at this time of year! So basically between that and the holiday time off, they’ll be at work very little for the remainder of the year, thus leaving the work uncompleted. So if you need to work with any of these people, you’re going to be out of luck until after January 1. I personally only have 4 days left so will be one of the sad sacks hanging around work during the week of xmas, but I seem to be the exception.
I think this might be one of those unintended consequences of the company implementing this new policy. Don’t get me wrong – the policy is pretty standard, really, and I am just glad I get so much vacation time at all. I usually have no problem using it up, and I try to use it up during summer rather than saving it for the holiday season. But a lot of people like to save days until the end just in case something comes up that they’ll need to take time off. Then it gets down to the wire, and they have to use their remaining days because it would be insane to just lose them. So if you have a heavy workload (like we all do) this time of year when everyone is trying to get projects done before the end of the year, you’re screwed.
Some things just won’t get done that were expected to be done, and that’s the reality of it. So it kind of made me wonder today whether there was a reason our company allowed for carry-over days in the first place, and now we’re kind of going backwards.
I mean, everyone agrees that most companies say ‘use it or lose it’ and that’s standard. But we didn’t have that policy for years. Why? Maybe it was just an extra perk, who knows, but maybe someone at some point made the conscience decision to allow carry over considering work loads. The policy would seem to help people manage their projects better, particularly at year end. If you needed an extra few days to finish something up, no problem. You could forgo your time off and finish the job, then use up your days maybe after the holidays when things settle down.
At any rate, the whole thought of moving backward reminds me of politics in the US these days. I hear a lot of libertarian drivel about free markets and removing regulation, restriction, yadda yadda yadda, and just let things happen as they will. But we have reasons for regulations, like EPA restrictions. We have reasons for employments laws against discrimination. So it really scares me to hears these sort of libertarian, “tea party” ideas that will plop us back 30 years+ or so.
We can’t leave it to the goodness of a corporation’s heart to do the right thing because the free market will punish them if they don’t. That may or may not be true, but in the meantime significant and / or irreversible damage could be done to us as a society or to our environment. For example, should we let a corporation get away with lying about the safety of their product, or disguising something harmful ? Their motive is to sell at the highest margin. You think Marlboro would put a cancer warning on their packaging if they didn’t have to? You think they would avoid marketing to children in order to create life-long addicts if they didn’t have to? Should a nuclear facility be allowed to dump their waste into our rivers and lakes because it is cheap and convenient for them?
It’s just all so backwards. Yikes…
