My husband got a $40 gift card and everyone was taken out to dinner last night. He also got a Yeti mug and either lunch is being ordered today or they are going out again. I got nothing but its the nature of my job.
I receive the equivalent of an average months pay every december, although much less than that is left after taxes. The same happens every may or june (vacation pay). In essence I get 14 salaries a year, as is fairly typical for not for profit organisations in the Netherlands. I think most for profit businesses here pay out some kind op performance based bonus; the vacation pay is mandatory (it is actually the law).
I got bonuses as a fed. Sustained Superior Performance most years, Special Act awards, etc.
Now I am at a start up, so no cash bonuses. Nice little gifts, however.
My boss gives us all a small $ Visa gift card, which I strongly suspect comes out of her own pocket. I’m grateful she does it.
All of the front line management and hourly people at our company are eligible for an annual bonus. It’s added to the last paycheck before Christmas. This year they will be getting $750 each - the maximum under the plan. I’m higher management, our bonuses are tied to performance goals and are paid in March for company performance the previous year.
For years, at the family-owned bank I worked for, the multi-millionaire owners would come around just before Christmas and personally give every employee their bonus - a crisp, new $10 bill. Maybe three years after I started, they sold to another bank and everyone got a percentage of their annual salary, starting at 5% for entry level employees and rumored to be about 30% for senior management. On the one hand, you don’t want to squawk when your bonus is $20k, but the taxes!
My current company is more cynical - every month you get a bonus based on productivity and attendance; for December - the busiest time of year - they double that, so if you call off or slack off, you lose twice as much.
I work a Mon-Fri shift year around, no holidays off unless they fall on a weekend and no one calls off sick, and my company won’t even say “Merry Christmas” when I call in if I have to work that day. No cash, no gift not even a card.
Back when I worked at Blockbuster, there were two years in a row where they gave, I believe, everyone in the company a new DVD. One year it was Bruce Almighty, the next year it was Elf. I enjoyed both of them, so they were 2-for-2 in my book.
Yep. Been with this company 11 years and have received Christmas bonuses in all but 2 of the years (during the ‘too big to fail’ recession years).
I work for one of the biggest mobility companies in the world; they keep sending out emails bragging about how well they are doing, how many billions more they made this year.
No Christmas/holiday bonus at all.
They offer a monthly performance bonus of between $75-125, but have made it damned near impossible to get it.
Nope. But I get a nice winter break (though I’ll be spending it writing my reappointment portfolio, doing lab work, and writing two papers).
My company is very generous. There will be some sort of surprise holiday gift, generally some sort of consumer electronics like a phone. We had a dinner party at a swanky restaurant, including spouses. Some special catering brought into the office. And an overnight trip to a ski resort, although I think that is more misc winter fun than holiday related. Bonuses are separate from Holiday celebrations, but aren’t far off.
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Ha. I don’t think ‘moderate’ was the right word for our salaries, which worked out to a touch over minimum wage at the time (average work week being 50-60 hours, salaried). So while a week’s salary was still not a lot of money, it meant a lot at the time.
Yup, 1500 before taxes. Guess I got things pretty good for a change.
Funny thing, most places I’ve worked for handed out sizable bonuses, and I’ve worked at a number of places. I never thought that getting a Christmas bonus was out of the norm. This thread has been an eye opener.
I am surprised too in a bad way. My consulting company gives us very impressive gift bags during Employee Appreciation week in October (this year we got FitBits and $100 gift certificates to Amazon plus a meal of our choice with a limit of $50 a person to anywhere we wanted). We also get profit sharing that hits at random times a couple of times of year. That is always between $1000 and $2000 dollars. There is also the year end bonus that averages about $10,000. All of that is completely independent of the 150% match on the 401K plan and mostly free health care plus completely free dental care.
I also get bonuses from my dedicated client including catered box seats to major sporting events like the Boston Celtics or Red Sox along with random gifts when they think I did something really good.
Reading this thread made me really sad. I am paid very well and the benefits are excellent but I still work in a very blue-collar environment as an IT Operations Manager. I thought that almost everyone got similar benefits. I am proud of my employers for providing unusually good benefits because it encourages loyalty and going the extra mile when it is necessary but I am not happy that most employers do not follow a similar model at least on a small scale.
Yes, sort of.
From August until December I was on medical leave. Having come off medical leave, I returned to work only to find that I had been laid off. My employer being a Trump supporter, he tried to convince me that being on med leave for so long is just like quitting and so he owed me no termination pay.
Fat chance, says I. I do my research and find out he’s lying through his teeth, then file a complaint with Alberta Labour. Step one of that process is to lay out my entire complaint and present my now ex-boss with it, informing him that if this isn’t settled within 10 calendar days the complaint becomes active and he can deal with Alberta Labour. He says he’ll have his lawyer deal with it and I say that’s wonderful.
Two days later I receive a phone call from my now ex-boss. “What will it take to make this go away before Christmas?” he says. Now I’m owed six weeks pay by law, about $7800. So naturally I say “Ten thousand dollars and a stellar reference for doing this to me after working for you for nine years, the first six of which you paid me a sub-entry level salary.” Two days after that I’m signing the separation slip I should’ve had in the first place and getting $10000 wired to my bank account. And collecting my stellar reference.
Merry Christmas.
They hiring? My consulting firm gave me two options when I was hired:
[ul]
[li]Straight hourly @ X / hour[/li][li]Salaried - I get paid for holidays & get PTO but only make (X-y) / hour[/li][/ul]
Financially, the first one is better in that I’d make more money overall, but I chose the latter option so I get some paid time off for the first time in six years. Not financially smart, but the piece of mind in that I was able to blow off a ½-day to do something special because it “didn’t cost me anything” is worth something, too.
Therefore, I get paid on the legal holidays of Dec 26th & Jan 2nd.
They also had a happy hour, in their office, last week, but I was unable to attend due to a conflicting event. This week, they had a pot luck lunch in their office, though I think it was more for the people who work there (HR, admin, sales, recruiters, etc.) rather than the consultants they employ. I would have also needed to use PTO to attend. Given that we don’t really know anyone there, none of us attended.
They also rented out a movie theater last weekend for a specific timed showing of Star Wars. If you were available for a matinee at that time & location you could request tix for yourself & family on a first-come/first-served basis.
The firm I work at had a offsite, catered holiday luncheon last week. Consultants were invited to attend, but it was non-billable (off-the-clock) hours. Not a single consultant went.
My gf has a “winter break” from December 20 to January 5 this year. She gets a holiday bonus, as well as some sort of profit sharing. Makes me wish I was creative and smart like she is, although she works way harder than I ever have.
I get nothing. On the other hand I get a lot of PTO, so my bonus to myself is to take 2 weeks off at the end of the year with my leftover leave.
Long ago I worked for a consulting firm which gave bonuses based on performance. I would regularly get $5-10K.
Nope, not anymore. Starting this year we no longer get our “holiday bonus”. In years past if we had leftover sick leave time after 1st of December, we got paid for 40 hours of it. For example if I had accrued 92.5 hours of sick leave, I would have been getting 40 hours of it paid out to me on the last check of the year. The rest of the time just disappeared. We had a lot of “sick” people the last couple weeks before the time expired this year… Home office called the GM and wanted to know why we had so many people out sick the last month vs last year…
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