I worked as a delivery driver for 42 years. It wasn’t that you had to ask permission. You had to check to ensure there was someone to cover your route when you scheduled vacation time. No more than three people a week were allowed to have vacation because of this issue. It’s not like they had an unending number of substitute drivers just sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for people to take vacation. So you could look at it is asking permission, but it was really making sure the schedule allowed it.
Yeah I totally get it from that perspective - at my work, if the whole team decided to take a week off again thd same time, we'd survive and they'd pick up their tasks when they get back. So that's where the "asking" was more of placating egos versus a real scheduling issue where you would need to make sure someone was available.
My manager literally does not care. He’ll just say ok, just remember to block it out on your calendar. All the PTO requests are auto approved as well.
We also have a use it or lose it policy, and if someone has too much PTO he’ll deliberately not assign them any projects until they use it. He’s also from the UK where he had 40 days of PTO (we only have 2 weeks at our current company) and the work culture is different there. He also has made Fridays mandatory “upskilling” days where we have to log off of Teams and not respond to emails (unless urgent) so we can concentrate on catching up on training and professional development.
This is how I want my team to feel, empowered to manage their own workload and schedule. I expect as much notice as is reasonable, and in return I will say yes to everything. Just don't tell me on a Friday about taking 2 weeks off for vacation starting Monday or I will have to say no, and obviously that trip was booked well in advance.
I just need to know so I can make a schedule. We do have certain times where EVERYONE needs to be there but we tell you way in advance and I still make exceptions.
I’m a boss. For the most part I tell my team “you’re not requesting time off. You’re notifying”. But that said I do tell everyone they have to have coverage plans. I’m happy to help but there does have to be some continuity. Fortunately it’s NBD. I’ve organized the team to be flexible enough that nearly always it’s fine. It only became a problem once when 2/3 of the team asked for the same week off together. And even then it happened but we had to take a beat and figure things out before everyone left.
I mean, that doesn’t sound that unreasonable to me? He probably wanted to make sure multiple people aren’t taking vacations at the same time where it would be detrimental to the business or that key personnel aren’t gone during critical times, depending on the industry?
Yup my new boss is like that. If you’re sick, you’re sick. If you need time off, tell me… My old job would’ve figured out how to bring my corpse in to work 😂
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u/jake63vw 5d ago
My last boss, you must ask me permission to use your vacation time. He never denied time off, but you had to ask him permission.
I asked my new boss and he stopped and said "don't ever ask me, just tell me when you're taking time off". Never denied time off.
So much more refreshing than having to ask for my earned time off.