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Tag: employees
How Does Unlimited Vacation Sound? Some Companies Are Trying It Out

How Does Unlimited Vacation Sound? Some Companies Are Trying It Out

By Steve Twedt, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (TNS)

Unlimited vacation time sounds like a pretty good job perk.

Social media site LinkedIn this year joined the still-small-but-growing roster of companies offering employees as much time off as they’d like, with the understanding that the coupon is good only if they get their work done.

Estimates about how many companies offer open-ended vacations run in the 2 to 4 percent range, mostly small startups but including none other than General Electric, which earlier this year began offering unlimited vacation time to many of its executives.

What’s in it for the companies?

Besides being a strong recruitment and retention tool, such policies can free companies from any unused vacation pay liability if they currently allow vacation days to accrue. Proponents say the policies also bestow a sense of “ownership” among employees that cultivates a more committed workforce.

“This flexible scheduling has really come into play in the last six months to a year,” said Ginger Kochmer, the Philadelphia-based vice president of The Creative Group, a division of Robert Half International.

In a survey of 400 advertising and marketing executives and 400 office workers commissioned by The Creative Group earlier this year, 39 percent of executives said they believed productivity would increase if employees had unlimited time off. And 72 percent of managers and 56 percent of workers said they would probably take the same amount of time off.

That second finding is further backed up by a study commissioned by Project: Time Off, a Washington, D.C.-based group affiliated with the U.S. Travel Association. It found 41 percent of Americans did not plan to use all of their paid vacation days in 2014, leading the group to conclude “the benefits of vacation were no match for the fears that are keeping them at work.”

Those fears, in descending order, included the prospect of facing piles of work when they return, a belief that no one else can do their job (a smaller percentage worried they would be replaced) and lingering effects of a struggling national economy.

Some workers said they could not afford to take the time off, and others thought foregoing vacation would demonstrate dedication to their employer.

Open-ended vacation policies don’t work for every business. A year ago, the Chicago-based Tribune Co. offered unlimited time off for some salaried staff, then rescinded the policy one week later without explanation other than the change “had created confusion and concern.”

There are jobs that don’t easily lend themselves to an unlimited vacation policy, acknowledged Kochmer. In sales, for example, “The more hours you put in, obviously, the more success you’re going to have.”

And those who’ve adopted such a policy need to monitor and manage it, perhaps by scheduling quarterly performance reviews, to make sure the employee’s productivity doesn’t tail off.

But she said the idea of unlimited vacations is probably here to stay.

“Because the business environment is changing more drastically, you need to be flexible,” said Kochmer. “It really is becoming more common.”

©2015 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: In a survey of 400 advertising and marketing executives and 400 office workers commissioned by The Creative Group earlier this year, 39 percet of executives said they believed productivity would increase if employees had unlimited time off. (Fotolia)

 

Casino Closings Wipe $2B From Atlantic City Property-Tax Values

Casino Closings Wipe $2B From Atlantic City Property-Tax Values

By Harold Brubaker, The Philadelphia Inquirer

The closure of three Atlantic City casinos by mid-September will wipe $2 billion from the city’s property-tax values next year, exacerbating the already cash-strapped city’s financial plight, Mayor Don Guardian warned Tuesday.

By 2017, property values are expected to have fallen to as little as $7.5 billion from $20 billion five years ago, Guardian said during a conference call to discuss Atlantic City’s way forward as a tourism center following the rout of its casino industry.

In the short term, Guardian said the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs has made money “available for some bridge loans to make sure that the city continues functioning with this year’s budget because of any concern that we might have that a casino’s closing, going bankrupt might hold off payments.”

Over the next four years, the city needs to trim $40 million from its budget, Guardian said. The city recently passed a 2014 budget of $261.4 million.

Part of the savings will come from the elimination of entire departments, though Guardian said he couldn’t name them at this point. As many as 300 positions must be eliminated from the city’s workforce, some of which have already disappeared because of attrition, he said. As of July, 2013, Atlantic City had 1,267 full-time employees, according to a bond prospectus.

The Department of Community Affairs has also agreed to back a $140 million municipal bond offering that will be used to pay tax refunds and settlements. For example, the city owes the owner of Borgata $88 million for tax settlements covering the years 2011 through 2013.

Photo: Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT/Clem Murray

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America’s Would-Be Aristocrats Forget The Most Important Thing About Business

America’s Would-Be Aristocrats Forget The Most Important Thing About Business

To paraphrase Tolstoy, every successful small business shares the same traits. And they all begin with high quality employees. I’m thinking of three local establishments where I’ve traded for years: an auto repair garage, a dentist’s office, and a one-size-fits-all country store where I buy cattle and horse feed.

Along with just about everything else the aptly-named “Toad Suck One-Stop” might conceivably carry: from crickets and minnows to motor oil, pain remedies, kitty litter and homemade sandwiches. If you get up early enough, they’ll even fix you breakfast while somebody else loads feed sacks into your truck. (Toad Suck is a place name designating a long-ago ferryboat stop on the Arkansas River.)

It’s much the same at George Jett’s auto garage down in Little Rock; also at my dentist’s, whose name is Lamar Lane. The first thing you notice is familiar faces. People who work at these places stay for years. And they do so because they’re well-paid, earn decent benefits, and are treated respectfully. So they like their jobs, take pride in their work, and are glad to see familiar customers.

Now I’m not going to lie that I love going to the dentist. But I do like feeling among friends, even if it means hearing Dr. Lane carry on about his LSU Tigers. (Because my wife was born in Baton Rouge, where her daddy played ball, I get a double dose.)

Something else: how a business treats employees also tends to be a reliable predictor of how they treat customers. Dr. Lane does high-quality work and stands by it. If a crown breaks, he replaces it free without asking were you shelling pecans with your teeth.

My man George Jett hires good mechanics, values their skills, and guarantees their work. If the rattle’s still there, he’ll drive the vehicle around the block and then put it back on the lift to figure out why—also at no additional charge.

Jason down at the One-Stop isn’t exactly a philanthropist — at least not where Bermuda grass hay and Canadian night-crawlers are concerned. Keeping a business with so many moving parts running requires constant attention to detail. New hires that stand out back smoking when shelves need re-stocking tend not to last. Loyal long-time employees won’t cut them much slack.

Gas is cheaper at the Walmart across the river in Faulkner County, but the One-Stop’s pumps stay busy. It’s the community’s unofficial town hall. If you want to know who’s looking for a lost blue heeler or how Holly’s orphaned baby raccoons are doing, it’s got to be the One-Stop.

Ordinarily, such commonplaces would hardly be worth recording. So there are friendly folks at the country store.

Who’d of thunk it?

Unless, that is, you live in the United States of America, a large proportion of whose tycoon class appears determined to drag us back to the Gilded Age.

If they gave a Scrooge McDuck Award for the nation’s greediest knucklehead, the 2013 winner would be Home Depot’s billionaire founder Kenneth Langone, a Catholic who voiced public alarm at Pope Francis’s seeming enthusiasm for the gospel of Matthew 19. That’s where Jesus observes that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

The Pope didn’t cite that verse, nor discuss politics as such. However, his encyclical Evangelii Gaudium did warn against “crude and naive trust in the… sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”

What, not worship money? Never mind that this is elementary Christian doctrine. Langone warned that American plutocrats don’t want to hear about it even in church.

You may not be surprised this same worthy also regards President Obama as “petulant” and “unpresidential.” His hawklike visage appeared prominently in a Forbesphoto lineup of “Anti-Obama Billionaires.”

Scrutinizing the list, I noticed that almost everybody on it made his pile either by manipulating money or squeezing minimum wage workers dry: casino operators, real estate speculators, corporate buyout scammers, hedge fund geniuses, fast food franchisers, big box retailers, and Donald Trump.

Not a creator or manufacturer in the lot. This is our would-be new American aristocracy, largely bereft of — indeed actively hostile toward — the retail virtues I’ve celebrated. (None of whose practitioners necessarily share my partisan views; I’m talking morals here, not politics.)

But the good news is that according to Adam Davidson in the New York Times, old fashioned business ethics may be making a comeback through the unlikely agency of a Turk.  According to Davidson, the going thing in corporate circles is The Good Jobs Strategy, a book by Zeynep Ton, an M.I.T. business professor.

Ton argues that what some call the “Costco” strategy of hiring better-trained, better-paid employees “will often yield happier customers, more engaged workers and—surprisingly—larger corporate profits.”

As I was saying, who’d of thunk it?

Screenshot/Youtube