I work in a company of 2 people. The other person, who is also the project manager on every project, can’t schedule anything to save his life. He can’t even make plans to go to sleep. So if I consider taking a break of some sort, there is probably some huge project due on or around that day and it won’t get done if I’m not here to help. Or there’s a good chance he will be completely unavailable while I am gone, for some reason or another, and no support tickets will get completed. Or the stuff I am regularly scheduled to do won’t get completed cuz god forbid he learn how to do them.
Sometimes I’ll be like “Ok, I am taking [holiday] off” and he says “ok no problem” and it turns out it is a problem. Or I decide to work and he doesn’t come in so I don’t have anything to do so I shoulda taken the day off anyway.
TLDR: My company sucks and I never get extended time off.
I get soooo jealous of people who work in places where they can take off and there’s someone else left to pick up the slack. People who get a set number of days off. People who have a contract with outlined holidays.
15 years of running this company, you’d think I’d get time off!
It probably helps that I have worked here for 25 years and we are in the vacation industry. I get 6 weeks of vacation per year, plus 6 sick days, plus I can carry over unused days from the past year (I usually carry over 4), plus 11 company holidays, plus 3 Floating Holidays (can use whenever).
As far as when I can use them… as long as I get my work done, whenever. I have a laptop, and have worked some days on the back deck overlooking the golf course on my trip. Counts as a work day as long as I get my work done, but I don’t always.( take the time off, not get my work done). As far as notice… I sent an e-mail at 4am this morning to take today off. I drove 10 hours back from my son’s lacrosse tournament and didn’t get back until 3:30. The catch is, I very rarely spend an entire day without checking in on work at least a few times.
Still a nice perk and part of why my company keeps getting voted as one of the best places to work.
I have never had a problem applying for or getting vacation time, at least not since I got a graduate degree. I did have a boss right after I got my B.S. that would give me a hard time and would try to cancel vacations that he had previously agreed to (he once reimbursed me for my airline tickets when he refused to give ground).
Since getting a graduate degree I have worked in high tech as a researcher and have never had an issue. I do manage my own time and my own schedule, so I don’t take vacations when there is a crunch. But if I do my job correctly (and I do), there is never a crunch and I take vacation whenever I like.
Editing to add: If I had the OP’s job, I would probably quit. I am willing to work relatively cheap and I do put in long hours regularly, but if I had a boss that tried to dictate or limit my free/family time, I would look for a new job. Sorry to hear about your situation!
I’ve trained backup so I basically just tell my boss when I’m leaving. In any case I’m unless I’m in the middle of the ocean I can log in and fix anything that needs fixing.
I’ve never really had an issue. Usually I just submit a request. It’s approved as a matter of course. Then I just make some arrangements to have someone cover me.
Then again, being a fairly senior project manager/management, I can simply schedule my projects around people’s vacations (especially my own).
I have to run my proposed vacation days by the HR person. She will determine if it’s OK for me to be off. I handle the firm’s calendar, so if the two backup people for that function have already requested a particular period of time off, I won’t be approved for it. This rarely happens, but this year I will not be taking any time off around Christmas like I usually do. Which is mildly annoying, but the two backup folks travel to see family at Christmas and I don’t, so I’ll cope. Not to mention I took six weeks off unexpectedly this summer thanks to my husband’s emergency brain surgery, so I can’t whine too much about Christmas week. I usually ask for a few days off before Christmas, as early as January or February, but life got in the way this year.
Once she approves vacation time, I fill out a form, have the main partner sign it, give it to HR lady, and send an e-mail to everyone on my team that I’ll be out on whatever days.
These threads remind me why I’m never moving back to the US.
Since I moved to Australia, I just go online and schedule it. The online system sends an e-mail to my boss and he approves it. I pop something into the group calendar so we all know who’s where. If it’s more than a couple of days I’ll send him an e-mail letting him know where I’m up to with work and who’s going to cover while I’m gone.
The only time I’d schedule it in weeks or months in advance or even ask is if I was going to take all four weeks at once or something. I wouldn’t expect him to say no, I’d just have to schedule some hand overs.
The only time this hasn’t been so is when I first moved here and worked in a call centre. Then you just had to make sure there weren’t X people in the calendar ahead of you, so it behoved you to schedule as far in advance as possible. It was worker’s comp insurance, so we had a skeleton staff at Christmas and lots of people wanted the penalty rates, so it pretty much wasn’t an issue.
I don’t usually have to go out of my way to schedule time off except for the end of the year. I work in Medicare product management, so all the benefits reset at 12 am. on January 1st. We absolutely have to have coverage in certain areas of product management because we’re the people who provide IT direction. If something goes wrong and claims don’t process correctly, IT won’t proceed without sign off from someone on my team. It kind of sucks because I worked 20 hours last New Year’s Day.
If it’s not toward the end of the year and most projects are fairly stable, I can tell instead of ask for vacation.
It depends. I’m a lawyer in Cape Town South Africa. Its easy enough to do so between mid-December to mid January. The courts shut down to varying degrees and many small and medium sized law firms shut down entirely for varying periods. Its a great time to do so to - its high summer here and not as hot as it will get in January and February.
Any other time could be problematic, as it would mean trying to find someone else for court appearances. (small firm)
At my current job I set my own time off. I will work with my teammates to arrange our schedule(s) so almost everyone gets the time off that they want. It has never been a big issue for me.
At one previous job I was middle management and I was under-appreciated. When I took time off I set every thing up so that we would not run out of things and my team knew who was responsible for what and when they needed to get it done. This made my supervisor think that I did nothing. He then treated me very badly.
The next time I went on vacation, I did not pre-order nor did I give out long term instructions. I did not schedule the waste pick-up as far in advance as I had for my prior time off. I also did not leave a contact number. When I returned my supervisor gave me a raise and treated me like real folks.
For me, fairly easy. I work in a large company with plenty of support, so it’s rare that an emergency interrupts my vacation. I get 6 weeks a year (2 are a fixed Xmas shutdown) and am allowed to take them in any increment from six minutes (really) to the full amount.
My wife’s company is another matter entirely. Her bosses think she’s the only one who can deal with certain emergencies, and are constantly pressuring her to cancel vacations. She usually goes along with it, but occasionally draws a line in the sand. Last year, she and our daughter had pre-paid for a multi-week trip to Europe. At the last minute, big boss announced X had happened and mizPullin would simply have to cancel. He claimed it was “more important than anything”. No prob, mizP presented him with an itemized bill for ~9K of expenses and told him he had two choices… that we weren’t going to eat that cost. Turned out it wasn’t that important after all.
You think that until you have a baby, and realize you’re expected to provide six weeks of daily lesson plans for while you are on your unpaid maternity leave!
Basically, every employee has 20 legal vacation days determined by Belgian law (for every 12 months of employment) and 5 extra legal days that the company allows you to take. It is also possible to carry over these 5 extra days to the next year, as long as they are taken up before April (I think).
Scheduling vacation is pretty easy: you fill in a form with the dates you want off, specify if it’s for half-day off or a whole day, hand it over to your department’s supervisor to have it approved and signed et voila!
Then the form gets handed over to me (office assistant), so I can mark you as “off” on the attendance record excel file. No fancy online submissions, we’re just a small company.
I also check whether it’s a legal or extra-legal holiday, as this affects the payroll. The attendance gets sent to every manager and the HR officer every day, so they have an overview.
I only have to be careful not to take too many Wednesdays off, because our HR officer (also my supervisor) is not in the office on those days as back-up. But generally speaking, she always signs my requests without questions asked. Even suggested that I might take the 23rd of December off since we’re closed the rest of the week (I’m taking PM off then :)).
I also schedule well ahead, but I’ve seen colleagues requesting a half-day off in the afternoon for the same day. Or somebody could decide today to have tomorrow off and have it approved without trouble.
The longest vacation I have taken at this job was a week, but that was already booked before I got hired, yet they let me take it even though it meant being absent, two weeks after I started!
When I was working as a temp for data input, the rules were different: I had to be present for a minimum of three days and any absent days for the next week had to be indicated on a shared excel file before Friday of the current week. I had day contracts back then, so working a whole week = more pay of course, but I loved being able to take resting days when needed.
I just let my boss know when I will be taking time off and we figure out how to back fill my responsibilities. It’s not a matter of getting approval, it’s just a matter of making sure we have coverage. I’ve never had to ask for permission to take time off in my career.
That’s pretty much how it’s always worked for me, here in the US. I’ve never had the issues that most people in this thread are talking about; assuming it’s not weeks & weeks at a time, I just ask for the vacation, boss puts it on the schedule, everything’s fine.
Even when it has been a couple weeks or longer, it just took a little bit more lead time to get it approved.
As an expat, vacation days are a bit different for us. HR measures vacation days in hours so at my level I get 240 hours per year. We use these for vacations and end of year holiday visits to the US. Very seldom do we take one or two days off. We also get two paid R&R trips per year where we fly to Cape Town, London, or Paris for a week to recharge the batteries. The R&R trips are not to be used in conjunction with any paid vacation days. We also get the 16 Angola bank holidays.
Requesting days off is not very difficult but planning is necessary due to the nature of the work and usual staff shortages. There have been times when I had to send the family out while I waited for some well activities to finish, and then I could leave. In some cases, we fly people from the US offices over here to work while expats head home. Other times, they will allow you to carry vacation over to the next year.
Generally speaking, I don’t have any real resistance from management, as long as I don’t do something rude like schedule my vacation right at the point of a major release or system change or something.
I do usually have to train someone on what I do adequately enough that they can band-aid whatever it is up to the duration of the vacation if something craps the bed. That’s always annoying, because my personal opinion is that everyone in my dept. ought to have a standing trained backup for that very reason- what if one of us wins the lottery and quits the next day? All that accumulated lore and knowledge goes right out the window with no alternate repository, and in the short-term, someone has to figure out while under the gun what and how to do things for that system and/or business unit.
As far as the actual mechanics of it go, I usually give my manager a heads-up, verify that it’s ok, and then enter it in our timekeeping system, where he approves it, and everything’s kosher as far as payroll and HR are concerned after that.
The only really stupid and annoying thing that the company does is to lump sick time and vacation time together in one bucket as “Personal Time Off.” (PTO) This is stupid because while the company thinks of it as PTO, employees think of it as “Vacation”. Clearly most people choose to come in sick, because that’s what preserves their own “Vacation” days, as opposed to taking PTO for being sick, which is what the company would like you to do.
So our office is more or less a low-level disease exchange as a result.
It’s pretty brain-dead easy for me over here. I pretty much just tell my boss I’ll be out - no real notice is required. Hell, I could tell her right now that I’m taking the afternoon off and she wouldn’t really care. I make sure that nothing is due when I’m gone and, if so, I either finish it first or talk to the person I owe it to and let them know they can have it when I’m back. These days, I’ve actually been booking and paying for vacations before I even think to let my boss know that I’ll be gone. I have to admit, it’s pretty sweet.
For what it’s worth, from a manager’s perspective, I trust that people who report to me will schedule vacation appropriately. Unless it’s the New Year when all the managers have to get together to determine who takes off when in order to ensure coverage, I really don’t care when the people who report to me take off as long as someone else on the team knows enough (or can get up to speed quickly enough) to help if there’s an issue while they’re gone. Usually that would fall to me.
Most people who report to me are on top of their projects enough that my “management” is administrative and/or removing obstacles so they can do their job.
