Am I alone in thinking my work is being odd with how we request annual leave?

[Resident]

Could be worse. You could have the system we have at work.

We get 5 weeks off 3 x 1 week off and 1 x 2 week off. We don't get to choose or request when these are. They are put in our employee app in August for the next year ( which runs April to March). You can mutually swap with a colleague but only at the discretion of the management. This year my 'Christmas' week off is 2nd-9th January .....

 

[Ugley_Matt]

We don’t ask permission but do mention it 8n our daily stand ups . It’s a small team so feels quit natural but didn’t come down from management

 

[banja]

My system is to just not turn up as and when I don't feel like it. It works perfectly, especially considering I'm rarely in regular employment for some reason.

 

[Fubsy]

I arrange with my partner the days we would like/need off for the entire calendar year and then submit in January.

Management like it because they can easily plan around it, we like it because we can plan and not have the worry of not being able to sync up leave, I'm sure some of my colleagues hate it - but hey, I've just show you what you can do, not my fault you wait until June to start booking dates.

A system like in the OP would end up tit for tat and no one would go on leave and cause all sorts of problems for management. Gives the worker bee way too much power over colleagues lives.

 

[JamesH85]

I find that whole system weird tbh, everywhere we have worked we have a system that you can log into and request leave e.g. leave Wizard, you log in request your leave and it's approved by a manager, everyone does however have full visibility of when the rest of the team is on leave.

 

[Gypo]

I use Google Forms and form mule plugin with a workflow, 150 staff and it all goes into a sheet with the plugin sending emails on your behalf dependent on the decision.

 

[OspreyO]

Could be worse. You could have the system we have at work.

We get 5 weeks off 3 x 1 week off and 1 x 2 week off. We don't get to choose or request when these are. They are put in our employee app in August for the next year ( which runs April to March). You can mutually swap with a colleague but only at the discretion of the management. This year my 'Christmas' week off is 2nd-9th January .....

Ouch. I hope it pays well. Some jobs are just like, you have to cover shift etc.

 

[OspreyO]

....
Am I wrong to find this whole thing weird?

Not just weird but its open to abuse. People could use it to block and inconvenience other people.
It creating potential conflict, that the existing system doesn't.

 

[UTmaniac]

OP, is your boss Boris?

Got his responsibility shirking written all over it.

 

[ttaskmaster]

Stand up on your desk and, politely, shout across the whole office, asking if anyone minds you taking X dates off...

 

[OspreyO]

Our place is a bit daft. We use a shared outlook calendar. But not everyone fills it in.
We also are very hit and miss having people cover each others leave.
We don't often share the information required to cover each others work.
We keep a duplicate shared paper form we send around, thats currently a shared excel 365 document.

We are only dept run like this. Every other dept in out places uses an application to manage and track leave.
We do use this application but only for the flexi clock.

I say this is daft because we are the IT dept and we host and maintain this application that everyone else use, that we mostly don't use.

 

[Sudden]

The latter is kind of how it works at mine actually, at least in our team. I ask my manager if it's ok, and quite often he'd ask me (/the other person) to just check that someone else in the team wasn't also planning to be off at the same time and if not, then it's approved. Only two or three other other people in the team though so not tricky to manage or do and on the flip side, there could be an issue if multiple people were off at the same time. If yes, then if there's only a day or two overlap, then likely not an issue either. Worked this way for years and never really had an issue. We do have a company-wide formal system to request it too, but that is a formality. Most of the time submit it in there long after the leave's been taken, lol.

Maybe helped by the fact that I don't have kids/celebrate Christmas, so my manager is normally off during school holidays and others want to be off during Christmas, which could be contentious times I imagine. I don't care about either though so happy to work during those times anyway

 

[BigT]

I think most places adopt a policy of the manager has the responsibility of approving and generally with two considerations. 1. Do you have the allowance 2. Do the business priorities mean it's convenient for the company - 90% of the time 'convenient' means not everyone is off already. And first come first served is generally everyone's approach

I personally like the idea of creating unity and autonomy within the team by letting them discuss dates and maybe even work it out amongst themselves with, 'Hey Amy I really want to see my sick Nan then, is your holiday movable because I don't think we can both be off at the same time?' type conversations. But not at the price of abdication of responsibility from the manager and certainly not mandated as policy which will simply create friction.

Thus the spreadsheet you currently have supports my way of thinking I've seen success with and upper management's policy in fact will suck. I suspect they've been on a leadership coaching course or read a book that talks about team autonomy and cohesion and have been keen to do something/anything without actually exploring what's in place already and how it supports the theory they just read up on.

 

[BigT]

The latter is kind of how it works at mine actually, at least in our team. I ask my manager if it's ok, and quite often he'd ask me (/the other person) to just check that someone else in the team wasn't also planning to be off at the same time and if not, then it's approved.

I think this is subtly different. Your team sounds quite cohesive and small. Ask yourself if someone else was off and you really wanted to be would it cause grief or an argument between you and your colleague. Would bad beef linger? Would your line manager duck making a call you'd both abide by.?I'm going to guess the answer is probably "no" to those questions and why it works.

 

[Puzzled]

Wow, after reading all these replies, it makes me realise how informal our process is. All we have to do is book a meeting slot in outlook calendar. Don't even have to set it to accept replies.

I hate it when you have to book all your holiday in at the start of the year, as if you have the year planned out already for what you are going to do socially and for holidays etc. Well maybe some people do but its far too organised for my liking (guess its more people with kids that plan so far ahead).

Luckily work is very informal so I can just ask for a day off whenever really and in very rare circumstances it won't be possible.

 

[chroniclard]

Sounds like a extremely poor way of manging it. We also use BrightHR, works great.

Though there are only 7 of us, so its easy.

 

[Russinating]

Yeah stupid system. We're a small team but we use Absence.io; employees view a calendar, it'll show everyone else's holiday and once submitted it gets accepted or declined.

 

[OspreyO]

I think most places adopt a policy of the manager has the responsibility of approving and generally with two considerations. 1. Do you have the allowance 2. Do the business priorities mean it's convenient for the company - 90% of the time 'convenient' means not everyone is off already. And first come first served is generally everyone's approach

I personally like the idea of creating unity and autonomy within the team by letting them discuss dates and maybe even work it out amongst themselves with, 'Hey Amy I really want to see my sick Nan then, is your holiday movable because I don't think we can both be off at the same time?' type conversations. But not at the price of abdication of responsibility from the manager and certainly not mandated as policy which will simply create friction.

Thus the spreadsheet you currently have supports my way of thinking I've seen success with and upper management's policy in fact will suck. I suspect they've been on a leadership coaching course or read a book that talks about team autonomy and cohesion and have been keen to do something/anything without actually exploring what's in place already and how it supports the theory they just read up on.

I've seen places where people including managers block peoples leave dates just out of pettiness.

 

[Nasher]

Lol one place I worked at wanted something similar. They said no 2 people in the same team could be off at the same time, but that meant people couldn't take leave when they wanted in summer and Christmas etc. So we just said **** it and called in sick instead

(Management weren't that smart).

 

[d_brennen]

Wow, after reading all these replies, it makes me realise how informal our process is. All we have to do is book a meeting slot in outlook calendar. Don't even have to set it to accept replies.

Same but it's first come first serve