Checked out the holiday time schedule, and boss, it is time for another minion-to-boss talk. Sure, the work has to get done. Sure, business can be hectic now. Sure, everyone wants off.
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But a holiday is a holiday and maybe letting folks stay home after Christmas and New Year’s Day may boost morale better than a year-end gift in the paycheck. But let’s discuss that another time.
Who, you ask, is so generous with company time?
A fair amount of Chicago-area firms, apparently, and their ranks are growing, according to the Management Association of Illinois.
The survey of 400 companies shows that one-third will consider Dec. 24 through 26 as paid holidays. Only 10 percent of the surveyed companies will do the same for Dec. 31 through Jan. 2. Twelve percent of the companies will shut down for Christmas week.
What’s important here, says Mary Lynn Fayoumi, vice president for the non-profit human-relations organization, is for companies to “give people control over their personal time.” Not all companies can take a break when their business is at a peak.
But those that candon’t just get a payback in employee morale, they also avoid having skeleton staffs during the holidays, or, in the case of manufacturing facilities, with paying the bills for keeping their factories open.
Which gets us to the holiday party; something we note is not on the bulletin board. While three out of four Chicago firms will stage a holiday gathering, according to the Management Association, a number are putting them off to January or February. Their rationale: People are burnt out by the holidays.
Saving time: While we are talking about keeping people on the job, we were struck by the way the Drake Oak Brook Hotel goes about this. The turnover rate at the 35-year-old, 150-worker suburban hotel has been about 3 percent monthly for most of this year.
The hotel, which was taken over in February by Camberly Hotel Co. of Atlanta, allows its workers to set up personal time-off bank accounts. The accounts take in workers’ time off for illnesses, holidays and vacation.
The numbers are regularly updated on workers’ paychecks, and they can take these days off with supervisors’ approval. The bottom line for the company, according to hotel officials, is that workers are discouraged from calling in sick.
To reduce employees’ gripes that swell and fester when ignored, the hotel also has a toll-free hot line for workers to discuss the problems they are having with colleagues and bosses.
Mob hits: While dutifully surfing the web on company time, trying to keep our head down and our fingers nimble, we came across a cornucopia of accusations about mobbed-up unions, unions drenched in corruption and workers sold down the river.
Such heart-stopping tidbits rarely show up in union newsletters, and given the dearth of union reform movements, they are more likely whispered about.
But not by the Combined Counties Police Association, a small labor group that has been organizing Chicago-area police for nearly 30 years. Once its membership reached 3,000, but now it is down to about 1,000 members among suburban police organizations, said John J. Flood, its president.
His group puts out a twice-monthly newspaper, the Illinois Police and Sheriff’s News, with a circulation of about 18,000. It is about as reserved as any tabloid, but its subjects are mobsters and their sometimes ties to unions. Its web site–http://www.ipsn.org– gets about 50 hits daily.
“Most of the reaction we get is favorable,” says Flood, a former detective and supervisor for the Cook County Sheriff’s Police. “Over the years I have been threatened so many times, it is pathetic.”
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Stephen Franklin can be reached at [email protected]