Startup is fining employees for contacting colleagues on vacation
fortune.com
fortune.com
Non-Paywalled for those interested in reading more.
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.
Bottom line people are sloppy and/or their schemes can't handle them not being constantly present or "sunlight".
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.
On a normal business day people will coordinate all the time and funds or resources can be moved, locked, released etc for operational reasons and no one will question a thing because everyone knows their part only and those who know the big picture are not exposed to these operations on daily basis.
So if an employee is doing something shady, they will act based on the developments on the ground. For example if a client is going to withdraw their money, they can move funds from another account to cover for the missing funds. If the employee is cut off for an extended period, they won't be able to arrange this and will trigger an investigation.
There are of course regular audits but these audits will catch you only if funds go missing or some other obvious irregularities are happening because they can't analyse every single action of the employees.
I was told that it's not unheard of employees taking the money from the client accounts and invest it stocks or crypto, take the profits and put back the money. They are usually caught when the investment doesn't pay off and can't put the money back.
Also, apparently there are cases of employees conspiring with criminal organisations to launder money. Handling of the client by another employee can reveal the shady business.
So in essence, any fraud that requires maintenance can be potentially uncovered in the absence of the fraudster.
https://www.fdic.gov/news/financial-institution-letters/1995...
To quote the most relevant bit (although the page is short and readable):
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"Vacation Policies - It is the FDIC's goal that all banks have a vacation policy which provides that active officers and employees be absent from their duties for an uninterrupted period of not less than two consecutive weeks. Such a policy is considered an important internal safeguard largely because of the fact that perpetration of an embezzlement of any substantial size usually requires the constant presence of the embezzler in order to manipulate records, respond to inquiries from customers or other employees, and otherwise prevent detection. It is important for examiners and bank management to recognize that the benefits of this policy may be substantially, if not totally, eroded if the duties performed by an absent individual are not assumed by someone else. Where the bank's policy does not conform to the two-week recommended absence period, examiners should encourage the board of directors to annually review and approve the policy followed and the exceptions allowed. It is important in such cases that adequate compensating controls be devised and strictly enforced. When it is determined, after thorough consideration of all relevant facts and circumstances, that the bank's vacation policies are deficient, the matter should be discussed with the chief executive officer or directors. Comments and recommendations on the supplemental Internal Routine and Controls schedule may be appropriate."
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.
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.
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.
Mine? Ellucian.
Article doesn't say why only one week per year
"That decision helped set expectations for appropriate vacation length per year."
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.
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.
And regarding your plan: Depends on the employer but yes it works. I had a colleague who didn't plan to do any big vacation so he just took a day of every friday for months.
Similar in my country. The legal minimum by law is 24 days and based on a 6 day work week (Mon-Sat) thus for most workers it's 20 days.
Similar, everyone is Russia believe that they are paying only 7% income tax, which is also not true, because your employer pays close to 40% of the taxes for you, which you don’t know of.
Based on that, if “regular” Russian folk (without doing much research) looks online, they think that they live in one of the best countries:
- taxes lower than everywhere else, they think it is 7%, when it is close to 40-50% (one of the highest in the world). - vacations are only 20 working days, which is good on average.
The article says
> That decision helped set expectations for appropriate communications with those on vacation
I'm not sure what motivates someone to manipulate a quote in such a highly deceiving manner.
The employer getting the financial benefit of the fine seems very “Amy’s Baking Company” to me.
> forces employees to pay $1,200 if they contact people who are on a break
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?
It's not. It's just a private valuation on a piece of paper, not real money you can readily exchange for real cash.
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!
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 :)
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).
Wouldn't ever want to work somewhere that tries to punish me for doing my job when someone else screwed up theirs.