Time off and Company Holidays

[Guest KarenL]

I am the office manager for a brand new start-up company in the pharmaceutical sales and marketing industry, with 4 employees. I need some advice w/r/t PTO bank versus allotted days for vacation/sick/personal days. Looking forward to recruiting,I would like to match the current trends within the pharmaceutical industry as much as possible. Many pharmaceutical companies close for the Christmas holidays; how does this affect the number of vacation days and company holidays? How is the time accounted for - in the company holidays or are employees forced to use vacation days? What seems to work best?:confused:

[mroberts]

As long as you don't really care how your employees are spending their off days, go with a general PTO bank and don't worry about whether any days off are vacation, sick days or whatever else. It's much more administratively friendly.

As far as determining the number of fixed holidays, most companies have between 7 and 10 days. Do the pharma companies shut down for maybe the day before and day after Christmas or is it for a week or two? Since you are a smaller company and geared towards sales, maybe you don't need your employees around for a week or so. Most sales oriented companies don't care where you are as long as you're producing.

There are a lot of things to look at when determining how you want to handle a PTO bank, so if you would like to discuss further, just send me an email.

Take Care!

[david rigby]

http://www.shrm.org/hrnews/articles/defaul...age=052402a.htm