Comments on: three days for death (or why hr policies make no sense)

By: fran

fran — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:00:27 +0000

victorio, ooh, i cringe at the “employees not at work are not driving the business.” a major pet peeve of mine, that mindset.

rachel, i think we’ll always need guidelines. but aren’t performance expectations kind of those?

ellen, that takes the cake. i’m sure getting approval in writing would be top of someone’s to-do list.

By: Ellen Rossano

Ellen Rossano — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:15:29 +0000

I am cringing…In late Dec.1992, my grandmother and an aunt died within a week of each other. After taking a couple of days off for both funerals (the second one was the week between Christmas and New Year’s) I got a memo from my boss with an additional hand-written note demanding that in the future, I get all requests for days off for funerals approved in writing, IN ADVANCE! I saw him this past week for the first time in since 1993, and the thought of that still made me ill.
I’m glad your husband’s company was able to work it out.

By: Rachel Happe

Rachel Happe — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:07:24 +0000

This is a really interesting discussion. I’ve been on both sides of this fence. As a young 20-something with a father dying, my consulting firm had me traveling around the world 4 days a week. The week he died, the whole company was at a retreat that I missed. There was no acknowledgment from my boss or anyone else and I took it as vacation. They would have paid for me to go to business school – I moved on without regret.

As a manager, I’ve had to deal with an open-ended vacation policy and with employees from two different companies merged into one. One of my employees expected to have six weeks of vacation – taken in one large dose over the summer. I didn’t really think this was fair and equitable but struggled with it because there was no explicit policy or even guidelines about seniority and vacation. He was not a bad employee in any other way… just wanted a lot of vacation.

Tough on both ends.

By: Victorio

Victorio — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:39:08 +0000

My thoughts and prayers go out to your husband’s colleague and his family.

Great comments one and all. Here are a few of my thoughts:

1. The company’s culture (size, employee make-up, industry, etc.) will determine its policies and how it chooses to enforces them. All policies and procedures flow from that.

2. Companies are in the business of making money. Employees that are not at work are not driving the business. That’s the traditional way of viewing ones workforce; this is one reason why most people still travel to a work location even though their job can oftentimes be accomplished at home or elsewhere.

3. Companies HATE lawsuits. Rigid policies are put into place so that employers can show that they’re treating their employees consistently and fairly (at least on paper). Litigation sucks and it, along with overly complicated government regulation, makes enacting restrictive policies the lesser of 2 evils.

Correcting this isn’t going to be easy, but it does need to happen.

By: Tim Sackett

Tim Sackett — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:37:53 +0000

Fran -

I’m with you – stop writing policies for the employees/managers who will take advantage – write policies for your top performers for what the right thing would be. For those who take advantage and want to take bereavement leave because their best friends, sisters cat died – well, you need to manage them off the bus.

By: fran

fran — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:32:46 +0000

greg, i love anyone who’s willing to play devil’s advocate. it’s my favorite role! however…i’m not sure i agree that migrating toward gray is harder for big companies. (though the recent brouhaha over at AA is a great example of the lack of flexibility in bigger orgs. read this if you don’t know what i’m referring to: http://www.hrcapitalist.com/2009/11/you-want-to-talk-about-our-infighting-and-politics-youre-fired-a-cautionary-tale.html.) let’s say for argument’s sake that it is, that still leaves the question should we really manage to what you identify as the .3%? i personally don’t think so.

By: Tammy Colson

Tammy Colson — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:52:01 +0000

Fran,

Although…. “do the right thing” doesn’t pay the bills. ~grin~
I’d love to HAVE to find a new way of generating income.

By: Greg Matthews

Greg Matthews — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:50:07 +0000

At the risk of being a Philistine, I am going to play devil’s advocate here. I work for a company that employs almost 30,000 people.

While 99.7% of the folks employed here work in good faith, that .3% represents 900 employees who are going to do everything possible to skew the game in their favor. Without some kind of policy backing, this puts a lot of pressure on managers to make “fair decisions” – and I think that we can all agree that every person may have a different definition of what’s fair.

Now, I will admit that the bereavement discussion doesn’t work as well with this argument as taking sick days, for example … because it would be easy to counterargue that only a tiny percentage of those 900 “bad-intent” employees will have a death in their family at any given time.

But the principal behind the policy raises, in my mind, legitimate questions. In a small company (or community, or any other social group) it makes sense to rely on the honor of individuals. But the chances of having dishonorable individuals goes up the larger a community gets … and dealing with those dishonorable individuals can take a massive amount of time from their managers and from their HR departments.

Believe me, I am not an advocate of managing to the lowest common denominator. In reality, I agree with and support every comment on this board. I just wanted to recognize that it’s not easy for companies – especially big ones – to actually live out those principles.

By: fran

fran — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:38:34 +0000

tammy, “do the right thing.” so simple, right?

frank, ifractal and yikes..two local businesses i love for their smarts and generous spirit. oh, and my husband’s amazing.

steve, another great reason to drop the policies…

By: Steve Boese

Steve Boese — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:28:53 +0000

So many of these policies I think simply exist to try and not only control employees, but also to control managers. Think about it this way, if there is no stated policy, Manager ‘A’ might be more flexible with things like bereavement, illness, kids school activities, etc. Manager ‘B’ might be very old-school and ‘by the book’. Once employees see that Manager ‘A’ is a real person, they all will want to work for him/her. And so companies, rather than try to instill a common-sense, human approach to this, find it easier to enact a policy, so that no discretion and interpretations are necessary by line managers. Great idea, protect and prop-up weak managers at the expense of the good ones, and the employees that are ultimately affected by this narrow thinking.

Great post once again, Fran.