Floating Holiday Policy
Caitlin
9 Posts
Does anyone have a Floating Holiday Policy that they are willing to share?
Currently, we offer 11 holidays to employees. However, we are a 365/24/7 organization so are seeing huge financial repercussions because we have to staff on all of these 11 holidays. We are thinking of converting to 4 holidays, and then having 6 other floating holidays that will be earned at a rate of one holiday every two months. Any unused floating holidays will be lost.
Currently, we offer 11 holidays to employees. However, we are a 365/24/7 organization so are seeing huge financial repercussions because we have to staff on all of these 11 holidays. We are thinking of converting to 4 holidays, and then having 6 other floating holidays that will be earned at a rate of one holiday every two months. Any unused floating holidays will be lost.
Comments
Apparently, no one uses floating holidays like you suggest. We have just one floating holiday that ee's can use anytime throughout the year. My brother used to work for a local township and often when their offices were closed for holidays was the best time for him to get in and do special facility projects. He would take the day before or after off as his holiday with their blessing. So, what you propose makes sense. Maybe a variation of your idea would be to allow those who must work the holiday to take off another day, say, within a week of that day. Of course it would have to be scheduled in advance so you could control how many are off at the same time.
I appreciate your assistance. Our organizational needs are somewhat atypical so I figured this may not be a hot topic but thought I'd give it a try anyway. And I like the suggestion of allowing those who work on official holidays to have a "holiday" that needs to be used in the vicinity of the official holiday.
This has spread the time off out over the year and enabled us to stay open on holidays. It has worked quite well for us.
We don't have one where I am now, but I use to work for a company that had 3 designated floating holidays. The day after Thanksgiving,Christmas Eve, and New Years Eve
They had skeleton crews on those days. Every year in October each supervisor would get a sign-up list to pass around. The policy was that you had to choose one of the "floating holidays" to work and the other two you would be off. Of course seniority ruled and the supervisor would make sure that department was covered. We were not a 24/7 company. Perhaps you could do that with all of the Holidays. The company also bought a nice lunch for the skelton crews on those days.
Marla
As a public employer, non-exempt EEs working on a set holiday can receive 1 1/2 pay or have comp time to be used within 30 days.
Works good for us.
During our last round of labor negotiations, I proposed something similar to your floating holidays request.
We called it a holiday hours bank. The ees chose 4 standard holidays wherein they would be paid as usual, 1.5 pay for working the holiday or paid day off. The other 7 days were converted to 56 holiday hours they could take off any other time of the year as personal leave. Holiday hours not used during the year were to be paid out at year end.
Unfortunately when it came down to the wire the group rejected it. I believe it was just to big a change for them and will introduce it again in 2008.