Friday is Employee Appreciation Day, and sure, you should do something. Buy everyone lunch. Send brownies to me. (I realize I don’t work for you, but I do love brownies.) Say thanks to everyone, but the reality is, it’s far more important to show your employees you appreciate them every day. Here are 10 ways to show your employees you appreciate them every day-and they won’t cost you a penny
1. Dump a stupid rule.
You have a stupid rule. I almost guarantee it. What kind of stupid rule? How about a doctor’s note for every absence? How about making your exempt employees (who aren’t billing time to clients) track every minute? How about docking PTO time from exempt employees for every hour they aren’t in the office, but not giving them additional PTO when they work more than 40 hours in a week? These are all dumb rules. Dump them.
to keep reading, click here: 10 Free Ways to Celebrate Employee Appreciation Day Every Day
Yes, dump those stupid rules! It costs the company more then they know or acknowledge. Good employees don’t need to tolerate, and won’t tolerate, stupid nonsense.
That PTO being docked for exempt employees happen to me. While putting in 50-60 hours every week I was docked half a day PTO because I had a doctor’s appointment which caused me to be two hours late. Seriously, half a day taken away for 2 hours? Yes, they are that stupid; claiming that PTO is only in full or half days. Actually, I don’t consider this to be just stupid; I also consider it to be unethical. It is a form of theft, in my opinion.
When I complained, the excuse was “this is policy.” Well, my own personal policy is to not work with stupid, unethical, people. I started looking for a new job; landed it a month later. While the new job wasn’t that great – at least I wasn’t being “cheated” out of pay.
And, for whatever it is worth; I got that half day PTO back. Since they also have a policy of paying out unused PTO and they had taken that half day from me and therefore didn’t pay me for it; they were, in essence, docking my pay. After, I pointed this out – they paid me for it. Total idiots!
Employee appreciation should be celebrated all the time. Each employee brings something to the table each day and should be acknowledged for it. Also, it should not matter if you work for contractors or in an office.
That PTO docking but not getting comp time is huge. At a place I worked a while back we billed by the hour, so they want us to be really billable. We’d be out of town, staying late at an archive doing research because taking advantage of their late hours was the best thing to do and rack up insane amounts of uncompensated overtime. We got no comp time and if we wanted to take an afternoon off it was a federal case.
Oh and we got 21 days combined vacation and sick leave and were *required* to use 5 or 6 (I forget) of those days for *Federal Holidays*. Yes, we had to accrue Federal holidays. We had a Jewish guy who told them he wanted to work Christmas – it wasn’t his holiday – and since he was using his own PTO for it, he shouldn’t be made to take off Christmas. Needless to say, he worked Christmas Day … .
I got out of there pretty quickly.
Great article. I’m non exempt, and that stupid PTO rule is in place where I work. 4 hours or 8 hours, so if I miss 1 hour of work in the AM due to a dentist appointment, and have 39 hours on my time card, I’ve been forced to use 4 hours PTO. Our manager doesn’t like us to make up the time, because then we’re not using our PTO and it could be used for “fun” things. But again, this isn’t consistent, it depends on the day, or whatever planet is in alignment, or something, because sometimes we can make up time, and other times we have to use PTO. I’ve decided if the “you must use PTO” trend continues, my appointments will occur at 1 PM on Fridays, and since I live so far away from work, gee, I won’t be able to get back after my appointment and will just come back in on Monday.