Re: Can We Require Employees to Make Up Time Off During Our Busy Season
Exactly. Don't forget that as well as being legally permitted to require employees to make up time, you are also legally permitted to say to the employee, "No. You may not have that time off. You'll have to take it another time".
There is a two week period in our year where the only way anyone on my team is allowed to take time off is if someone dies or the employee is in the hospital. The only reason I was allowed time off to go to my brother's wedding, six states away, was that the two week period ended on a Wednesday and I asked for Friday off.
You are in control, not the employees.
Re: Can We Require Employees to Make Up Time Off During Our Busy Season
Accrual is .04 or .0403 hrs/hr worked, depending on the employee and what they have negotiated. They can also get PTO hours as a bonus for working above and beyond.
Here is the request verbiage, is there anything you would recommend changing?
"How to Request UTO or PTO
1. One month notice is required for one day or more absences from normal working hours. If you require only a half day or less absence a two week notice is acceptable. Emergency absences will be dealt with on a case by case basis.
2. Fill out “time off request” form and give to the office.
3. Request is not granted until approved, you will be given notice of approval within two weeks of request for requests less than two months out.
4. Any request more than two months out will not be approved until one month ahead of time."
The planned days off are not so much the issue, we can usually manage to deal with that by planning our schedule accordingly. The issue is the unexpected sicknesses, either themselves or children (somehow they always have to take the day, never their spouse), and the "Monday/Friday flu." Which is why we wanted to make sure that we could require them to make the time up if required. Example, this week we had three people out Monday, two with sick kids and one who was just sick. The sick worker was out until yesterday with no doctor's note, never even went to the doctor. Now the two people who were out Monday have managed, by working super hard, to get caught up on their work so we aren't going to require them to work tomorrow. The one who was out for three days is not anywhere near being caught up, nor does he even have enough PTO or UTO because he has used it all this year already, so we are going to require him to make up some of his hours tomorrow now that we know we are able to do so without issue.
Our busy seasons run for over half the year, so a blackout for time off isn't very feasible for the entire busy season. However, we could do a black out for a couple weeks right before our customer's hard dates (Fishing opener, Memorial Day and snowmobile season opening) which would ensure we were meeting the most urgent demands... Even if we are late on the delivery date, they are usually fine as long as we get it back before those dates.
Thanks for all your suggestions!
Re: Can We Require Employees to Make Up Time Off During Our Busy Season
I have been reading this thread and I want to point something out. There are really two issues that have come to mind.
There is what is legal in your state and there is your employment policies. The two are very different. I'm not going to comment on what is legal but consider the fact that happy and content employees are loyal and more productive. It depends on your industry (service, manufacturing, supply, etc.) how long it takes to train someone to do the job. if you lose someone that has been with the company for years, you have to train someone new and productivity goes down . You don't seem to be a very big company.
People do have lives outside of work. And it is not always known what circumstances will come up. Do you want your employees to have to constantly choose between private life and their job? The point is that if you adopt some strict policy that pits private life against your policies you will not have very happy employees.
For example:
Quote:
4. Any request more than two months out will not be approved until one month ahead of time."
So if an employee books a vacation more than one month out, they will not know if they can have the time off until after they booked the vacation? Then I guess you would have them cancel?
Perhaps you should consider hiring another employee and consider cross training all your employees so when someone is out you have someone to cover their duties.
Just something to think about.
Re: Can We Require Employees to Make Up Time Off During Our Busy Season
We understand that our employees have lives. We bend over backwards to keep these guys happy, make sure they are able to take trips, work OT if they need more money, take long lunches to make the kindergarten graduations, so on and so forth. I cannot remember the last time we did not grant a PTO request or even a UTO request. I've worked here 10 years and two of the guys have worked here about 15 years, obviously they are happy. #4 was put in there very specifically in response to an employee who was abusing the PTO policy. It's been a non-issue with all of our employees because we aren't jerks about it. I am not going to get into specifics, but we are so far from being draconian about this sort of thing that we have more of an issue with people taking advantage than wanting to leave because we won't let them take time off or have lives.
My question was simply to do with whether or not we could require them to make up hours. This is primarily due to an issue with one worker in particular who has been absent fairly regularly lately, causing issues with production so we wanted to know if we could require the hours to be made up or not. Like I said in my previous response, if they catch up during the week, it isn't even a request we would consider, it only becomes a question when it is incredibly clear that they are not going to catch up.
Yes, we could hire someone else temporarily to fill the need during the busy season. Unfortunately the issue with hiring a temporary worker is that 95% of the time they do not have the skills to do the job. Our industry isn't something you can hire someone off the street to do without intensive training, so it is important to keep everyone happy and hiring someone just to lay them off a couple of months later is a complete waste of our time. It's also important to keep our customers happy and to get the work done, which is impossible to do when you lose hours of productive time unexpectedly.
Every employee that is capable or willing to be cross trained is cross trained. That doesn't do anything to help when I have a full schedule for all of the different jobs every week. Pulling one person off their job to fill in somewhere else is only going to make their particular job or project get behind. A good 80% of our business is custom work so it's not as easy as it may be in many other industries.