HP breaks for Xmas week - aka 'staff hols' - source HP has reportedly flicked the switch on its main sites and required employees to take holiday leave between Christmas and New Year, in a move to cut labour and running costs, a source tells us. An operator on HP's switchboard confirmed to El Reg that the company's main sites will be closed until 5 January. The insider told us …
As a former HP plod the mandatory holiday office closure is nothing new. We were required to hold on to vacation to accommodate the holiday closure. As a road warrior I didn't mind, as around Christmastime travelling becomes more of a nightmare than it already is. From a business point of view it makes sense as well, as the majority of client staffers are out on holiday, and little gets done.
Who in their right mind actually thinks that ANYTHING productive will get done during the Holidays anyway? Better to shutdown than overwork a skeleton crew.
Scheduled shutdowns often happen in certain businesses, it's easier for the company and often easier for the employees and customers.
More like a 1/3rd if they are on minimum 20 days annual leave since Xmas, Boxing and New Years days are already holidays, at least here in most of the UK. 2nd also, in Scotland. And if those days fall on a weekend, you get the equivalent weekdays off instead.
It may be different in other parts of the world. Especially those who don't do Xmas or have a different new year.
You must be the HP guy who thought that's a good idea to squeeze few bucks to get your OWN bonus. If it makes sense for business to shut down, shut it down but don't force people to use their OWN VACATION. Some companies give this time as a bonus for the employees! This is 2015! Employees are not slaves!
>Employees are not slaves!
Exactly and they will work some place else better with a brighter future like say most other places. Word gets around and yet another problem HP has is its reputation on how it treats its employees. No way I would even bother interviewing with them or Intel strictly based on their reputations from word of mouth from friends and colleagues.
I currently work for HP in the Americas,and the shutdown had been going on since before 2007. I compel agree that the employees shouldn't be responsible for trading vacation while HP saves money by choosing the doors. However, if they didn't do the shutdown i suspect more people,good people,would lose their jobs. So I've become accustomed to the sacrifice as have most other HPers.
Large firms in the area such as Lockheed Martin have been doing the same for decades. Ironically, those who have work on mission proposals to NASA, which are often due just after New Year's Day, end up writing on their holiday leave, and the company gleefully saves the cost of bid and proposal work.
Even the US I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be legal for a company to not have any time off. Maybe he works for one of those companies with ping pong tables and masseuses at their disposal that did away with vacation by trusting employees to take time off as needed and not abuse the option? If you have one of those hyperactive startup cultures where people work 90 hours a week, it seems silly to allocate them x days of vacation when they've already worked more than the average person does in a year by the first of June.
@ Steve Davies 3
New fashion in Silly Valley, quite a few companies doing that. Effectively, vacation allowance is removed. You can take any amount of paid leave you like (yes - exactly that). You have to deliver all of your deliverables on time and hit your performance ratings. That's all :)
So if you want to bugger off on hols for 60 days a year, you can do so, provided that you _DELIVER_.
It is quite nice, but makes the life of a middle manager hell as they have to ensure that everyone has clear deliverables to keep this thing not spiralling out of control. It is also mostly USA so far, it will be interesting to see it applied in Europe.
Anon - my company is considering it from this year :)
>but makes the life of a middle manager hell as they have to ensure that everyone has clear deliverables
And that exactly right there is why this will be a no go for many companies. I can see it working for a strictly software development house but for many people many of their deliverables end up being solving business problems that pop up unexpectedly during the work day. Also the real reason companies are trying this is to guilt workers into to taking even less vacation is my guess.
It's easy for middle managers - they just have to pressure their employees into never taking any vacation. The result is that people take "vacation" by leaving and taking a break for a few weeks before they take the next job.
But that's ok because having key technical staff leave and trying to replace them in this market is a great cost saving.
>having key technical staff leave and trying to replace them in this market is a great cost saving.
Must live in the UK. Here stateside truly competent technical staff are expensive to replace though with Baby Boomers retiring I guess it will only get worse though. Ask Sony how important it is to have competent technical staff instead of offshoring for pennies on the dollar.
I remember in the good old days(tm) when my company introduced a mandatory Christmas shutdown, they also gave us an extra five days paid time off with the proviso that the company reserved the right to dictate when we could take them. The festive period normally used up three of those, occasionally four, and as most people took the time off anyway, it was a net gain.
Of course, back then, employee welfare and benefits were taken into account. Perhaps if HP and others were to do that again, they'd get more motivated employees and they'd do a bit better.
As above, I've been working at HP for more than 25yr and can't remember there not being a shutdown between Christmas and New Year. And the only mandatory is four days, one of which (2 Jan) can be taken from either 2014 or 2015.
Not a problem in my book. My guess - this came from a grumpy TUPEd outsourcing colleague.
Move along.
Then you must remember the Y2K project - forced NON-vacation. There were some folks in IT who couldn't take vacation for months on either side of the new year (new century was 2001 to satisfy the pedants out there :) ). Have to say that work was worth it, considering the, erm, issues that were found (albeit a lot fewer that some folks were expecting).
More of a problem than the forced vacation were the years going under reduced salaries and the capping of vacation accounts, i.e. use it or lose it. The claim was employee health and well-being, etc., but in point of fact the beancounter types were looking at it as being a carried liability. That's the point at which the REAL HP disappeared, IMHO....
HP has been doing this for several years now. There are 3-4 days of holiday time off in there (depending on the year), the rest we have to take with vacation days. As an HP employee, I really like it, because I can take the entire holiday period off and when I go back to work I'm not buried under a mountain of backlog and emails, because everyone else was off at the same time.
I'm an ex HP employee and remember this happening when I was there. While ok for some, as somebody who doesn't really celebrate the festivities, is home based, works on an account that still operates during this period and would rather use those days for a proper holiday when things are actually open and travel doesn't cost a small fortune this really bugged me.
I'm working today... and using the time to catch up on compulsory training and stuff that is hard to do when the phones are constantly ringing.
I have just left HP after spending 9 years there and each and every year there was a shut down period. I worked for a business unit which was very active over the shut down period and we always received an exemption to the shutdown period. Applying for the exemption was as simple as sending a form off to the payroll department so they'd know to pay you ordinary hours. There is no story here...
We were told we couldn't have any more than 2 weeks unaccounted for leave, so we had to eat up anything we had left over so far. Didn't matter that this was standard practice in other firms, and who cares about 5 weeks of holiday anyway?
Found out later, some employees, had collected several months worth of holidays, and left the employer in the lurch for three months in a row while they were froliciking somewhere.
No story here. This happens every year! And having moved from IBM, I love it as it used to be a real pain in the backside there ... but then again, 31st December is their year end. As for being forced to take time off, you are given 25 days of which HP can mandate up to 4! Hardly Draconian! And carry over is at BU discretion too.
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