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Startup is fining employees for contacting colleagues on vacation
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoOnly reasons in my life I've had to contact someone on vacation is because they incompetently didn't hand over something before they went on vacation and now a project/deal is in jeopardy because of it. Wouldn't ever want to work somewhere that tries to punish me for doing my job when someone else screwed up theirs.
- LegitShady 4y agoget your or his supervisor to contact instead and problem solved.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoThere isn't one. Not everyone works at a company with a 5 figure head count.
- mtmail 4y ago"Dream Sports, an Indian fantasy sports company, forces employees to pay $1,200 if they contact people who are on a break. “Once a year, for one week, you’re kicked out of the [company] system…you don’t have Slack, emails, and calls,” founder Harsh Jain told CNBC in an interview, referring to the period as being on “unplug.” That decision helped set expectations for appropriate communications with those on vacation." Article doesn't say why only one week per year
- Yizahi 4y ago> Article doesn't say why only one week per year "That decision helped set expectations for appropriate vacation length per year."
- hef19898 4y agoAnd here I am, reading this in country were 30 days of vacation plus bank holidays are the norm, 24 days the bare legal limit and anything below 28 days considered exploitation.
- outcoldman 4y agoCurious what 30 days means in this case? When I used to work in Russia, the standard was 28 days (or 4 weeks), but there were some requirements: you have to take first vacation as 2 weeks minimum, most companies expect you to submit your vacation before the year starts, and you can take vacations only in weeks. So 28 days is actually only 20 working days. As basically it counts weekends too. In the US it was a disappointment to learn that I only had 15 working days as vacation, but after learning the system, you can always make it work way better, by combining bank holidays with vacations, you can be on vacation like 5-6 times a year, but shorter periods, which I liked way more.
- hef19898 4y ago30 working days, with the clear expectation to take all in a given year. In fact, you have to take the legal minimum of 24 days (varies with contractual working hours) per year. Employers insist in taking it all, any carry overs show up as outstanding accounts in balance sheets. As an example, you want to take of the week Christmas and New Year, the 25th and 26th are bank holidays as is Jan 1st. This year Dec. 26th was a Monday, so whole week required 4 vacation days. Some years bank holidays fabor employees, other years favor employers.
- outcoldman 4y agoThat is really cool! Not sure where you at, but feels like with so much vacation, I would just take 1-2 days every week at summer time, and have only 3-4 working days during summer. Can you do it that way as well?
- 4y ago
- rsynnott 4y agoWhile it's not made clear in this case, it's somewhat common for financial companies to do this as a fraud-prevention measure.
- kcplate 4y agoThe article also doesn’t say who gets the $1200 fine. Seems to me the disaffected person is the contacted employee, not the employer. The employer getting the financial benefit of the fine seems very “Amy’s Baking Company” to me.
- n2d4 4y agoIt's the person who initiates the contact (not the one who is on vacation): > forces employees to pay $1,200 if they contact people who are on a break
- kcplate 4y agoThat’s not what I am saying. I am saying who should get the money from the fine. Company imposes the fine. Ok, they are the authority in the situation, but the company was not hurt by the contact—in reality they likely benefited from it. As a company if you are going to collect fines to discourage the behavior, why should you (the company) get the financial benefit of fine?
- bryanlarsen 4y agoPaywall, but this is also likely a fraud prevention measure. It's hard to cover your tracks when you're on vacation.
- flandish 4y agoSome financial institutions will let people go for a solid two weeks for things like to prevent kiting or keeping other jobs alive that might be handling the various things in the background.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Brajeshwar 4y agohttps://archive.ph/3RNzw https://archive.ph/3RNzw Non-Paywalled for those interested in reading more.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- spaceman_2020 4y agoOff topic, but people need to stop saying that it's an "$X billion startup" as if it's a real thing. It's not. It's just a private valuation on a piece of paper, not real money you can readily exchange for real cash.
- snake_doc 4y agoThe company did receive real cash priced at the valuation. That’s how the valuation came to be, at its last capital fundraising round.
- gbourne 4y agoIt is the same as public markets, but just on a smaller scale. Instead of millions owning a % for $X, you have a few individuals/firms who agree % for $X. And you (the company) can exchange - tender offers, private sales, etc.
- ycombobreaker 4y agoThe same... with no public scrutiny, last trade price most likely reflecting a primary sale (i e. the market only contains buyers), and very few sample points overall. That's not the same confidence of price, even if the structure is analagous.
- yellowstuff 4y ago"Structuring" makes a huge difference. VCs will invest $10mm for 10% of a company, making it apparently "worth" $100mm. However, they will get guarantees such as a right to the first 30% of profit before any other investors get paid back. It's not straightforward to know precisely how deals like that that translate into the final value of the company, but it's a guarantee that it's less than $100 mm, and with harsh enough structuring the actual value of the company could be closer to $10 mm.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoPublic markets at least have some degree of liquidity. You can turn that paper into cash if you wanted to.
- hardlianotion 4y agoI heard a really good piece on Odds Lots the other day about truck drivers, who are monitored in real time, to enforce their compliance with working hours and road safety laws. The idea that was put across was that employers put drivers on the hook without modifying conditions of labour that would help them manage their compliance with regulations. This smacks of the same kind of thing to my mind. I can well imagine the situation that some engineers might find themselves in a pinch, that would pressurise them to contact someone on holiday. Fining, and on this scale is an inappropriate way to get people to respect vacation time.
- saint_fiasco 4y agoIt's a classic heads-I-win-tails-you-lose tactic. You put a rule in place that overtly punishes people who do something unethical for the benefit of the company (in this case, pestering their colleagues while they are on vacation) while at the same time you put your employees in a situation where they must break the rule to keep their jobs. That way management gets the benefit of employees engaging in unethical behavior in secret, while on paper everything looks clean and management is not responsible.
- jmclnx 4y agoThis should be standard everywhere. If you are in management and you cannot do without a person for a short period of time, you should look at yourself. But this leads into another issue, everyone wants the same time off. For example, now that it is January, people are rushing to the Vacation Scheduler to take days between Christmas and New Years. During that time, the most critical processing week where I work (Year End), lots of people are away. That puts mangers in a tough position, because in reality they can not deny vacation time. I really would not last long as a manger where I work, I would tell people no vacations during that period :)
- tpxl 4y agoIt's not like the solution for this is hard. Pay people extra to work during holiday times. Even better if you have people from different cultures that celebrate at different times (Chinese new year is January 22, Orthodox new year is January 14).
- sabellito 4y agoAt a company, management would keep raising the bonus for being on-call from Dec 24th until the Jan 1st until someone took it.
- alistairSH 4y agoMy son's US-based employer does this as well. Employees have to take 1-week per quarter and they're removed from Slack/Outlook for that period. I hadn't heard of anybody else doing this until now. That said, I've been at my employer 20+ years now and I've been contacted on vacation maybe 3 times and none required me to work beyond a 5 min phone call (none required logging into any systems remotely). Obv I'd prefer this didn't happen, but int the overall scheme of things, not bad.
- rockostrich 4y agoSame here at less time (~6 years and I think I've been contacted once while on vacation). It's definitely a culture thing and if you have a lot of siloing then you're going to have this problem.
- DoughnutHole 4y agoThis is common enough in financial institutions, although the purpose is less employee wellbeing and more that cutting people off from company systems for a while is a good way to uncover fraud.
- alistairSH 4y agoOh yeah, totally forgot about them. But like you said, that's for fraud prevention more than employee sanity.
- moneywoes 4y agoWhat company?
- alistairSH 4y agoMy son? Don't recall. Something managed services, he's an IT engineer/project manager. Mine? Ellucian.
- omgmajk 4y agoMy boss won't even consider calling anyone after a certain hour each day, exceptions are very rare. I haven't worked here long enough to have been on vacation yet but I would be surprised if anyone contacted me during that time.
- aliqot 4y agoFining? I thought I read 'firing' and got so excited I started thinking about updating my CV
- ubermonkey 4y agoI'm all for protecting PTO but fining people seems unnecessarily punitive in all but the most egregious circumstances. But hell yeah, take that time. For the last 15 years I've worked for a guy who maintains basically no work/life balance for HIMSELF but vigorously defends it for his employees. In exchange he has tremendous employee loyalty. Imagine that!
- mrtksn 4y agoI have a friend working in a large financial institution and by rule they are required to take 10 consecutive working days off every year when the rest of the department continues working. The reason for this is to detect fraud and systematic issues within the company. When an employee is not on premises and locked out of the systems, any problems with their work can come out without actively investigating their conduct. It also guarantees resilience to the organisation in case the employee departures abruptly.
- andylynch 4y agoThis is extremely common in the industry, although it’s common practice to still allow one to be contacted if needed, however no system or building access beyond possibly being able to check emails.
- theonemind 4y agoHow can locking someone out for 10 days reveal fraud? I don't have any financial institution background, and that doesn't make any sense to me.
- joshstrange 4y agoThe idea is that something (some metric) will spike/dip in that period that is different than normal ("Why do does our petty cash usage fall when X goes on vacation?"). It also means someone else will probably handle some/all of their "caseload" (aka "work") and might notice inconsistencies ("Why are we paying $X to Odd Corp monthly?"). Bottom line people are sloppy and/or their schemes can't handle them not being constantly present or "sunlight".
- jetbooster 4y agoIf said employee were actively defrauding the company and covering their tracks, they would be unable to make any fraudulent transactions or track covering in those 10 days. It's probably more like 16 days ultimately since it's probably business days, so there are 3 weekends as well. This would show up as a statistical difference in rejected transactions, contract overshoots, expense claims, something like that, I don't commit fraud. It would also potentially expose any conspiritors, because the locked-out employee's responsibilities+communications would be forwarded to someone else for those 10 days. This wouldn't help you if the locked-out employee contacted conspirator's out-of-band to warn them however. At least, that's the explanation. I guess the logic is that to avoid this, you would need to be making _larger_ fraudulent moves, less often. This would show up stronger against the background trade. Alternatively, simply the existence of these very obvious anti-fraud measures discourages people even if it's entirely possible they are a placebo. Similar to Lie Detectors, which only work on people who believe they work. I think it's value for company resilience doing forced hit-by-a-bus tests on their employees on the regular is far more valuable in the long run.
- wekabo7244 4y agothis policy seems to be a publicity stunt. most startups will have loopholes to bypass such policies in the name of critical work.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]