Sick days are last-minute days for when you are ill.
Personal days are last-minute days for when, say, a pipe breaks in your apartment and you have to spend the day dealing with the mess. Or any other non-medical reason you have to be a person and not an employee for a day.
I have often heard personal days are to be used if say, you can't get to work due to transportation issues or if your child is home from school. If they aren't to be used that way how do they differ from vacation days?
To be honest, if people are not told they need to give advanced notice for using their time off they often won't - especially when nobody else does.
Obviously, it's not always possible to give advanced notice (illness or other unforseen circumstances), so most employers require a brief explanation when advanced notice isn't possible - "Sick kid," "car trouble," "illness," etc.
These are normal policies, but they must be formal policies and communicated to employees.
If those policies are in place and you have people violating them - then it becomes an HR issue, with formal reprimanded, so a low level manager shouldn't have to complain about it.
I mean, are the employees required to give advanced notice if possible? Are absences expected to be explained? You can't hold employees up to an expectation without telling them that it's an expectation.
Are your deadlines so tight that any time off, even planned time off that corespondents to the employee's allotted vacation days would put you behind? If so then it's an indication the issue is with the project being understaffed or not staffed with the proper personnel, or the deadlines being unrealistic.
Are you requiring Herculean effort and unpaid overtime regularly? If so your employees are going to eventually breakdown and need a day to recharge. Sidenote: I've noticed some people are happy to work optional paid overtime but unhappy to work mandatory unpaid overtime.
Are your employees regularly missing so many days to the point they are regularly taking leave without pay and not getting prior approval? That is an upper management/HR issue.
I mean, there’s an upper bound on how often that can happen (how many personal days people have). Those days are intended to be used at short notice. So if people using them is a problem for the team, imo the team is not correctly matched to the workload.
I do think we often undersize our teams by ignoring the impact of vacation and personal time in taking on work ... but that’s not the fault of the people using the time they are entitled to as part of their compensation.
I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with leave days and team sizes; those things are probably perfectly fine.
The issue is:
> I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend.
but, also...
> Yes, there is a challenge of how to compensate when there is no equity upside...
The complaint here is that people don't have 'skin in the game', so they dont care if the product succeeds, because it makes to difference to them; so they're taking personal days in a way that disrupts the (probably totally arbitrary) timelines and plans they have.
...so I mean, it's probably fair to say that if people are taking leave in a way that is disruptive, then that's more of an indicator that the team culture is totally screwed up than that there aren't enough people.
If one person wants to 'win' and everyone else a) doesn't care, b) that person has no power to punish them if the product doesn't 'win', c) there's no benefit to them personally if it does 'win'... well, its never going to work out for that one person in the long run.
Uh. I mean. I see it. I’m not from here, I just live here. I came from the EU where 20 vacation days was the minimum to a state in the US where no vacation or personal time is required. I’m still blown away by what companies advertise as “generous”.
Maybe calm down with the assumptions and generalizations too though.
If you're running deadlines so tight or your bench is so shallow that any employee ducking out a day here and there is causing big problems, you have a planning/staffing problem.
The spontaneous employee vacation days are just making that problem more obvious.
If you treat people like resources I imagine its hard when they dont function like you want them to, consider treating them as humans (like you and me!) and you might just understand that they need some unexpected time off now and then.
Your job as a manager should be to ensure that things don't fall apart if people get sick. If there is a critical process managed by a single person then you failed as a manager.
In every single work I was at people sometimes took a day off next day. It is not like everyone would had infinite amount of days off - it was never a massive problem.
Once in a while someone is missing. Typically, rest of team moves on through their day normally.
Unless they interfere with scheduled meetings, I can’t see why this would bug you as a manager. Pair programming, counting hours for clients, or sprint planning are the only other things that could possibly conflict with last minute personal days. It doesn’t really seem to bug the managers at my organization if there are no calendar conflicts.
If there are calendar items that have to be rescheduled, I think the onus is on them to find an alternative time
