I took the day off, using 8 hours of my PTO/Vacation. I got paged by work to help handle an urgent technical issue after 5PM, and spent an hour and a half resolving the issue.
I intend to log 1.5 hours of time for the project that generated the issue, and no other time for the day. I regularly work 50-60 hour weeks and get paged at weird hours, so I don’t feel bad about it. My company has no clear policy on the matter, and my boss is generally sympathetic to my situation.
How does your place of employment handle it? Do you get the full vacation day back?
I’ve never had an on-call job, but if I’d ever gotten called back to work when I was on leave, I’d only be charged leave for the hours I wasn’t actually working. No way would I get a full day back. Then again, I was a Fed employee, and the rules are pretty clear.
I’m pretty sure in my current non-Fed job, if I got called in for a drafting emergency (???) I’d be paid for the hours I worked and charged leave time for the balance to make the full 8 hours. Or I’d be credited with comp time for the hours I had to work. Lucky for me, drafting never seems to have emergency requirements.
Quartz, in the U.S. you aren’t likely to have a contract.
When I was managing I was told we had to give back the PTO if they worked at all on a day - and certainly if we called them. We even discouraged checking email for that reason.
As a teacher, when I take a day off, it takes an extra hour or two to get things ready for the sub–writing much more detailed lesson plans, arranging all the classroom materials ahead of time, ensuring everything on the computer can be handled offline, etc. It’s part of why I stagger in to work unless I’m really sick; even then, I’ve staggered in (literally, one time so sick that I kept falling against the wall as I walked down the hall) to do final prep work on the day of.
I absolutely don’t get credited for the extra time it takes to prep for a sub.
In my current exempt role, we do indeed get credit for a full day worked if we spend virtually any time working that day. But I have no idea whether that’s about law or just my particular employer’s policy.
What kind of galley-slave drivers do you work for that you have to take PTO to go to the dentist or take a personal call for 15 minutes
Ours is generally along the lines of if whatever it is takes more than 2 hours, you probably ought to take a half-day, more than 6, probably a full day. There was a LOT of griping when our new parent company instituted half-day PTO; prior to that, it was more like “over 4, take a full day, under 4, don’t sweat it”.
But with that in mind, there isn’t really any recourse if you manage to get dragged in on PTO to do/fix something. Which is why I don’t answer my phone on PTO and do my best to be elsewhere and unavailable to actually work.
I don’t think I’ve ever worked under that exact situation.
When I managed a small business we had formal accounted-for annual PTO days, but we didn’t have an established policy to that level of detail. My attitude if this came up with one of my people was that if we wrecked your PTO day plans you get another one for sure; if not then maybe you get a replacement day or maybe you don’t.
Say we called with our crisis just as you and wife were about to leave for a rare night out w/o the kids and with fancy expensive theater tickets that now go to waste. Contrast that with having had a full PTO day of family fun at the beach, then being home in front of the TV after pizza and beer when we call.
Many’s the night I was the guy answering the call after dinner and spending 90 minutes on the phone / remote access troubleshooting some obscure thing the regular on-call person couldn’t fix. So I was pretty well calibrated to how it looks from the worker end of the telescope.
I also know who’s a super worker and who’s not. Super workers would tend to get the extra day because it’s one way to give a little extra without needing a formal process.
Where I work now we don’t have PTO but we do have the idea of “guaranteed” days off each month. Which if they’re somehow sacrificed by even 10 minutes for the good of the company we get back a whole replacement day. But that’s a matter of union contract, so not directly comparable to the OP’s case.
Ones who pay me quite handsomely to bill time to clients. I’m not working if I don’t have an account to bill my time to. And it would be fraud to bill a client for a personal call.
I’d probably give the employee the PTO, then let him slip out early/come in late one day the following week to make up the time. However, if the staff member is going to get paid for it, then no early dismissal. It’s one or the other.
My boss came in one day during her vacation to help us get ready for Hurricane Matthew. She’s a director, so it’s expected, but I’m sure her boss gave the the opportunity to make up the vacation time.
My favorite id when a teacher on unpaid FMLA (like, say, ro have a bay) is still expected to leave six weeks of plans and grade the papers the sub sends home. It doesn’t happen everytime, but it does happen, and it’s appalling.
As far as the OP, we theoretically can take a half day, but effectively have to take a full day for anything, and no one would blink about calling.
I’m much too lazy to provide a cite, but I have been an exempt employee and an employer for many, many years. The Federal and State DoLs consistently state that exempt employees who work ANY time during a day have worked the whole day. In other words, if an exempt employee comes in from 8:30A until 9:00A, that employee has worked that entire day. Part of being exempt is that you don’t “nickel and time” working hours. Exempt employees can’t be penalized for taking a long lunch break, or leaving a couple hours early. If an employer does penalize them, then they are actually hourly employees.
We don’t have a specific policy. This kind of works both ways, as “policies” don’t leave any flexibility to management, but leaving flexibility to management means unequal treatment.
In the OP’s case, I’d simply not log the PTO in the time system (official or your own Excel tracking system), and feel free to use the PTO some time in the future.
