Only reasons in my life I've had to contact someone on vacation is because they incompetently didn't hand over something before they went on vacation and now a project/deal is in jeopardy because of it.
Wouldn't ever want to work somewhere that tries to punish me for doing my job when someone else screwed up theirs.
"Dream Sports, an Indian fantasy sports company, forces employees to pay $1,200 if they contact people who are on a break. “Once a year, for one week, you’re kicked out of the [company] system…you don’t have Slack, emails, and calls,” founder Harsh Jain told CNBC in an interview, referring to the period as being on “unplug.” That decision helped set expectations for appropriate communications with those on vacation."
And here I am, reading this in country were 30 days of vacation plus bank holidays are the norm, 24 days the bare legal limit and anything below 28 days considered exploitation.
When I used to work in Russia, the standard was 28 days (or 4 weeks), but there were some requirements: you have to take first vacation as 2 weeks minimum, most companies expect you to submit your vacation before the year starts, and you can take vacations only in weeks. So 28 days is actually only 20 working days. As basically it counts weekends too.
In the US it was a disappointment to learn that I only had 15 working days as vacation, but after learning the system, you can always make it work way better, by combining bank holidays with vacations, you can be on vacation like 5-6 times a year, but shorter periods, which I liked way more.
30 working days, with the clear expectation to take all in a given year. In fact, you have to take the legal minimum of 24 days (varies with contractual working hours) per year. Employers insist in taking it all, any carry overs show up as outstanding accounts in balance sheets.
As an example, you want to take of the week Christmas and New Year, the 25th and 26th are bank holidays as is Jan 1st. This year Dec. 26th was a Monday, so whole week required 4 vacation days. Some years bank holidays fabor employees, other years favor employers.
That is really cool! Not sure where you at, but feels like with so much vacation, I would just take 1-2 days every week at summer time, and have only 3-4 working days during summer. Can you do it that way as well?
Sounds like Germany. At least this is exactly how it works in Germany.
And regarding your plan: Depends on the employer but yes it works. I had a colleague who didn't plan to do any big vacation so he just took a day of every friday for months.
Germany it is. The expectaton sonis that people at least once two weeks in row, not sure if there is something in the labor laws, but I wouldn't be surprised. That's a good thing so, as vacation is there for employees to relax.
Depending on where you work, you might find yourself required to take vacation a full week at a time. My job (in the US) does, because we can only have two people (of 11) on vacation per day, and before the week-at-a-time rule was implemented, certain employees would immediately sign out (nearly) every Monday or Friday of the month, meaning that nobody else could take a full week off.
It is also very interesting to read some articles about countries with most vacation, where Russia is also listed like they provide 28 days a year, that make it to be in the top of the countries with the most holidays. And we already know this is not true.
Similar, everyone is Russia believe that they are paying only 7% income tax, which is also not true, because your employer pays close to 40% of the taxes for you, which you don’t know of.
Based on that, if “regular” Russian folk (without doing much research) looks online, they think that they live in one of the best countries:
- taxes lower than everywhere else, they think it is 7%, when it is close to 40-50% (one of the highest in the world).
- vacations are only 20 working days, which is good on average.
That sounds similar to the UK system in that working days are mon - fri and weekend bankholidays roll over into the week (eg If Christmas Day is on a Sunday, Monday is a bank holiday). Compared to France where I work where Saturday can be counted as a work day (even if it isn't usually worked) and bankholidays that fall during the weekend aren't rolled over. In 2022 in the UK you could have taken 3 days and been off 25 Dec - 02 Jan whereas in France it would have required taking a full 7 days off.
I appreciate that explanation. I had no idea that some countries handle vacation like you describe in France. The US system of vacation days seems to be very similar to the UK - only counting from M-F and the bank/national holidays that occur on weekends are "observed" on either a Monday or a Friday.
This was a joke, alluding to a recent trend of companies switching to the "unlimited" number of vacation days (just recently Microsoft has announced it). Which leads to the teams enforcing unofficial limits to the vacation days, no more than 1-2 weeks, or you will be evaluated a low performer and fired or refused promotions/benefits. Not saying that's a rule, but it should be expected outcome.
One week still seem low compared to 25 minimum days "People working in India are entitled to 18 vacation days a year along with an additional 7 days of casual leaves, totaling to 25 a year." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...) but I'm otherwise not familiar with Indian work customs.
I agree. I promise to be more careful with quotes in the future. I'm using them very often to signify "sarcastic" subtext, and missed that it could have been interpreted as a real quote.
That’s not what I am saying. I am saying who should get the money from the fine.
Company imposes the fine. Ok, they are the authority in the situation, but the company was not hurt by the contact—in reality they likely benefited from it. As a company if you are going to collect fines to discourage the behavior, why should you (the company) get the financial benefit of fine?
Some financial institutions will let people go for a solid two weeks for things like to prevent kiting or keeping other jobs alive that might be handling the various things in the background.
It is the same as public markets, but just on a smaller scale. Instead of millions owning a % for $X, you have a few individuals/firms who agree % for $X. And you (the company) can exchange - tender offers, private sales, etc.
The same... with no public scrutiny, last trade price most likely reflecting a primary sale (i e. the market only contains buyers), and very few sample points overall. That's not the same confidence of price, even if the structure is analagous.
"Structuring" makes a huge difference. VCs will invest $10mm for 10% of a company, making it apparently "worth" $100mm. However, they will get guarantees such as a right to the first 30% of profit before any other investors get paid back. It's not straightforward to know precisely how deals like that that translate into the final value of the company, but it's a guarantee that it's less than $100 mm, and with harsh enough structuring the actual value of the company could be closer to $10 mm.
I heard a really good piece on Odds Lots the other day about truck drivers, who are monitored in real time, to enforce their compliance with working hours and road safety laws. The idea that was put across was that employers put drivers on the hook without modifying conditions of labour that would help them manage their compliance with regulations.
This smacks of the same kind of thing to my mind. I can well imagine the situation that some engineers might find themselves in a pinch, that would pressurise them to contact someone on holiday. Fining, and on this scale is an inappropriate way to get people to respect vacation time.
It's a classic heads-I-win-tails-you-lose tactic. You put a rule in place that overtly punishes people who do something unethical for the benefit of the company (in this case, pestering their colleagues while they are on vacation) while at the same time you put your employees in a situation where they must break the rule to keep their jobs.
That way management gets the benefit of employees engaging in unethical behavior in secret, while on paper everything looks clean and management is not responsible.
This should be standard everywhere. If you are in management and you cannot do without a person for a short period of time, you should look at yourself.
But this leads into another issue, everyone wants the same time off. For example, now that it is January, people are rushing to the Vacation Scheduler to take days between Christmas and New Years. During that time, the most critical processing week where I work (Year End), lots of people are away.
That puts mangers in a tough position, because in reality they can not deny vacation time. I really would not last long as a manger where I work, I would tell people no vacations during that period :)
It's not like the solution for this is hard. Pay people extra to work during holiday times.
Even better if you have people from different cultures that celebrate at different times (Chinese new year is January 22, Orthodox new year is January 14).
My son's US-based employer does this as well. Employees have to take 1-week per quarter and they're removed from Slack/Outlook for that period. I hadn't heard of anybody else doing this until now.
That said, I've been at my employer 20+ years now and I've been contacted on vacation maybe 3 times and none required me to work beyond a 5 min phone call (none required logging into any systems remotely). Obv I'd prefer this didn't happen, but int the overall scheme of things, not bad.
Same here at less time (~6 years and I think I've been contacted once while on vacation). It's definitely a culture thing and if you have a lot of siloing then you're going to have this problem.
This is common enough in financial institutions, although the purpose is less employee wellbeing and more that cutting people off from company systems for a while is a good way to uncover fraud.
My boss won't even consider calling anyone after a certain hour each day, exceptions are very rare. I haven't worked here long enough to have been on vacation yet but I would be surprised if anyone contacted me during that time.
I'm all for protecting PTO but fining people seems unnecessarily punitive in all but the most egregious circumstances.
But hell yeah, take that time. For the last 15 years I've worked for a guy who maintains basically no work/life balance for HIMSELF but vigorously defends it for his employees. In exchange he has tremendous employee loyalty. Imagine that!
It seems strong but it would prevent social pressure: “hey, I know it’s your day off but…” sounds different when it costs money and that makes it a lot easier for people to resist a pushy boss or coworker.
I have a friend working in a large financial institution and by rule they are required to take 10 consecutive working days off every year when the rest of the department continues working.
The reason for this is to detect fraud and systematic issues within the company. When an employee is not on premises and locked out of the systems, any problems with their work can come out without actively investigating their conduct. It also guarantees resilience to the organisation in case the employee departures abruptly.
This is extremely common in the industry, although it’s common practice to still allow one to be contacted if needed, however no system or building access beyond possibly being able to check emails.
The idea is that something (some metric) will spike/dip in that period that is different than normal ("Why do does our petty cash usage fall when X goes on vacation?"). It also means someone else will probably handle some/all of their "caseload" (aka "work") and might notice inconsistencies ("Why are we paying $X to Odd Corp monthly?").
Bottom line people are sloppy and/or their schemes can't handle them not being constantly present or "sunlight".
If said employee were actively defrauding the company and covering their tracks, they would be unable to make any fraudulent transactions or track covering in those 10 days. It's probably more like 16 days ultimately since it's probably business days, so there are 3 weekends as well. This would show up as a statistical difference in rejected transactions, contract overshoots, expense claims, something like that, I don't commit fraud.
It would also potentially expose any conspiritors, because the locked-out employee's responsibilities+communications would be forwarded to someone else for those 10 days. This wouldn't help you if the locked-out employee contacted conspirator's out-of-band to warn them however.
At least, that's the explanation. I guess the logic is that to avoid this, you would need to be making _larger_ fraudulent moves, less often. This would show up stronger against the background trade. Alternatively, simply the existence of these very obvious anti-fraud measures discourages people even if it's entirely possible they are a placebo. Similar to Lie Detectors, which only work on people who believe they work.
I think it's value for company resilience doing forced hit-by-a-bus tests on their employees on the regular is far more valuable in the long run.
For example some employees can override many checks and procedures for operational reasons and if they want they can use customer funds or conspire with people from outside the organisation to do shady things.
On a normal business day people will coordinate all the time and funds or resources can be moved, locked, released etc for operational reasons and no one will question a thing because everyone knows their part only and those who know the big picture are not exposed to these operations on daily basis.
So if an employee is doing something shady, they will act based on the developments on the ground. For example if a client is going to withdraw their money, they can move funds from another account to cover for the missing funds. If the employee is cut off for an extended period, they won't be able to arrange this and will trigger an investigation.
There are of course regular audits but these audits will catch you only if funds go missing or some other obvious irregularities are happening because they can't analyse every single action of the employees.
I was told that it's not unheard of employees taking the money from the client accounts and invest it stocks or crypto, take the profits and put back the money. They are usually caught when the investment doesn't pay off and can't put the money back.
Also, apparently there are cases of employees conspiring with criminal organisations to launder money. Handling of the client by another employee can reveal the shady business.
So in essence, any fraud that requires maintenance can be potentially uncovered in the absence of the fraudster.
To quote the most relevant bit (although the page is short and readable):
----
"Vacation Policies - It is the FDIC's goal that all banks have a vacation policy which provides that active officers and employees be absent from their duties for an uninterrupted period of not less than two consecutive weeks. Such a policy is considered an important internal safeguard largely because of the fact that perpetration of an embezzlement of any substantial size usually requires the constant presence of the embezzler in order to manipulate records, respond to inquiries from customers or other employees, and otherwise prevent detection. It is important for examiners and bank management to recognize that the benefits of this policy may be substantially, if not totally, eroded if the duties performed by an absent individual are not assumed by someone else. Where the bank's policy does not conform to the two-week recommended absence period, examiners should encourage the board of directors to annually review and approve the policy followed and the exceptions allowed. It is important in such cases that adequate compensating controls be devised and strictly enforced. When it is determined, after thorough consideration of all relevant facts and circumstances, that the bank's vacation policies are deficient, the matter should be discussed with the chief executive officer or directors. Comments and recommendations on the supplemental Internal Routine and Controls schedule may be appropriate."
Check kiting is a fraud which requires daily maintenance. If locked out of internal access for two weeks, the risk of exposure would rise dramatically. Would need to involve a co-conspirator or achieve solvency before the mandated break (which I thought could be randomly assigned).
67 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadWouldn't ever want to work somewhere that tries to punish me for doing my job when someone else screwed up theirs.
Article doesn't say why only one week per year
"That decision helped set expectations for appropriate vacation length per year."
When I used to work in Russia, the standard was 28 days (or 4 weeks), but there were some requirements: you have to take first vacation as 2 weeks minimum, most companies expect you to submit your vacation before the year starts, and you can take vacations only in weeks. So 28 days is actually only 20 working days. As basically it counts weekends too.
In the US it was a disappointment to learn that I only had 15 working days as vacation, but after learning the system, you can always make it work way better, by combining bank holidays with vacations, you can be on vacation like 5-6 times a year, but shorter periods, which I liked way more.
As an example, you want to take of the week Christmas and New Year, the 25th and 26th are bank holidays as is Jan 1st. This year Dec. 26th was a Monday, so whole week required 4 vacation days. Some years bank holidays fabor employees, other years favor employers.
And regarding your plan: Depends on the employer but yes it works. I had a colleague who didn't plan to do any big vacation so he just took a day of every friday for months.
Similar in my country. The legal minimum by law is 24 days and based on a 6 day work week (Mon-Sat) thus for most workers it's 20 days.
Similar, everyone is Russia believe that they are paying only 7% income tax, which is also not true, because your employer pays close to 40% of the taxes for you, which you don’t know of.
Based on that, if “regular” Russian folk (without doing much research) looks online, they think that they live in one of the best countries:
- taxes lower than everywhere else, they think it is 7%, when it is close to 40-50% (one of the highest in the world). - vacations are only 20 working days, which is good on average.
The article says
> That decision helped set expectations for appropriate communications with those on vacation
I'm not sure what motivates someone to manipulate a quote in such a highly deceiving manner.
The employer getting the financial benefit of the fine seems very “Amy’s Baking Company” to me.
> forces employees to pay $1,200 if they contact people who are on a break
Company imposes the fine. Ok, they are the authority in the situation, but the company was not hurt by the contact—in reality they likely benefited from it. As a company if you are going to collect fines to discourage the behavior, why should you (the company) get the financial benefit of fine?
Non-Paywalled for those interested in reading more.
It's not. It's just a private valuation on a piece of paper, not real money you can readily exchange for real cash.
This smacks of the same kind of thing to my mind. I can well imagine the situation that some engineers might find themselves in a pinch, that would pressurise them to contact someone on holiday. Fining, and on this scale is an inappropriate way to get people to respect vacation time.
That way management gets the benefit of employees engaging in unethical behavior in secret, while on paper everything looks clean and management is not responsible.
But this leads into another issue, everyone wants the same time off. For example, now that it is January, people are rushing to the Vacation Scheduler to take days between Christmas and New Years. During that time, the most critical processing week where I work (Year End), lots of people are away.
That puts mangers in a tough position, because in reality they can not deny vacation time. I really would not last long as a manger where I work, I would tell people no vacations during that period :)
Even better if you have people from different cultures that celebrate at different times (Chinese new year is January 22, Orthodox new year is January 14).
That said, I've been at my employer 20+ years now and I've been contacted on vacation maybe 3 times and none required me to work beyond a 5 min phone call (none required logging into any systems remotely). Obv I'd prefer this didn't happen, but int the overall scheme of things, not bad.
Mine? Ellucian.
But hell yeah, take that time. For the last 15 years I've worked for a guy who maintains basically no work/life balance for HIMSELF but vigorously defends it for his employees. In exchange he has tremendous employee loyalty. Imagine that!
The reason for this is to detect fraud and systematic issues within the company. When an employee is not on premises and locked out of the systems, any problems with their work can come out without actively investigating their conduct. It also guarantees resilience to the organisation in case the employee departures abruptly.
Bottom line people are sloppy and/or their schemes can't handle them not being constantly present or "sunlight".
It would also potentially expose any conspiritors, because the locked-out employee's responsibilities+communications would be forwarded to someone else for those 10 days. This wouldn't help you if the locked-out employee contacted conspirator's out-of-band to warn them however.
At least, that's the explanation. I guess the logic is that to avoid this, you would need to be making _larger_ fraudulent moves, less often. This would show up stronger against the background trade. Alternatively, simply the existence of these very obvious anti-fraud measures discourages people even if it's entirely possible they are a placebo. Similar to Lie Detectors, which only work on people who believe they work.
I think it's value for company resilience doing forced hit-by-a-bus tests on their employees on the regular is far more valuable in the long run.
On a normal business day people will coordinate all the time and funds or resources can be moved, locked, released etc for operational reasons and no one will question a thing because everyone knows their part only and those who know the big picture are not exposed to these operations on daily basis.
So if an employee is doing something shady, they will act based on the developments on the ground. For example if a client is going to withdraw their money, they can move funds from another account to cover for the missing funds. If the employee is cut off for an extended period, they won't be able to arrange this and will trigger an investigation.
There are of course regular audits but these audits will catch you only if funds go missing or some other obvious irregularities are happening because they can't analyse every single action of the employees.
I was told that it's not unheard of employees taking the money from the client accounts and invest it stocks or crypto, take the profits and put back the money. They are usually caught when the investment doesn't pay off and can't put the money back.
Also, apparently there are cases of employees conspiring with criminal organisations to launder money. Handling of the client by another employee can reveal the shady business.
So in essence, any fraud that requires maintenance can be potentially uncovered in the absence of the fraudster.
https://www.fdic.gov/news/financial-institution-letters/1995...
To quote the most relevant bit (although the page is short and readable):
----
"Vacation Policies - It is the FDIC's goal that all banks have a vacation policy which provides that active officers and employees be absent from their duties for an uninterrupted period of not less than two consecutive weeks. Such a policy is considered an important internal safeguard largely because of the fact that perpetration of an embezzlement of any substantial size usually requires the constant presence of the embezzler in order to manipulate records, respond to inquiries from customers or other employees, and otherwise prevent detection. It is important for examiners and bank management to recognize that the benefits of this policy may be substantially, if not totally, eroded if the duties performed by an absent individual are not assumed by someone else. Where the bank's policy does not conform to the two-week recommended absence period, examiners should encourage the board of directors to annually review and approve the policy followed and the exceptions allowed. It is important in such cases that adequate compensating controls be devised and strictly enforced. When it is determined, after thorough consideration of all relevant facts and circumstances, that the bank's vacation policies are deficient, the matter should be discussed with the chief executive officer or directors. Comments and recommendations on the supplemental Internal Routine and Controls schedule may be appropriate."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_kiting