I can’t understand this, and I’m so frustrated with it at work. If I need to leave a half hour early for an appt, apparently they would rather I stop working an extra half hour early, leave and have a half hour to kill before my appt. If it could make sense in my head maybe the aggravation can stop. Thanks.
In: Economics
Only thing I can think of is they don’t want to or can’t track fractions of an hour in whatever system they are using.
There has to be a cutoff somewhere. Should someone who only needs 20 minutes have to take a full half hour?
Depending on where you are, probably the law.
They are required to make you take a full break, to make sure you are not pressured into taking a shorter break than you actually need instead.
Ofc. The state can’t know what your optimal break time is, so they select a break that is long enough for the majority of people.
Edit: re-read the question, while I stand with my initial comment, I also think administrative issues play a big part, as others have already mentioned
The process of off-boarding a salaried employee that’s no longer with the company requires a payout for unused PTO. The management of PTO across larger organizations can be cumbersome, it’s not worth micromanaging. That’s why some companies have gone to an “unlimited” PTO plan.
They might be trying to push you to use it for full vacation days, not hundreds of random errands.
Or maybe there is a complexity in the time charging process that they want to avoid. If you took a bunch of fifteen minute breaks all week, does that get manually entered or approved by anyone in your system? “Yeah X was out friday morning. Approved” vs “shit i dont remember all these random breaks X took. I didnt write any of this down”
From a policy perspective, an argument can be made that some jobs simply don’t tolerate short interruptions well. I can probably cover a fry cook for 30mins, but if my closing store manager wants to leave 30 minutes early, I probably have to round up another manager to be there a full hour to cover that shift. Making partial PTO hours available to some employees means I incur a risk of other employee complaints of discriminatory treatment. And, practically, I’ve totally seen employees use partial PTO days, and simply don’t bother contributing at all that day. It’s a way to pad your vacation time on the employer’s dime (and, technically, fraud if you want to be honest.)
I’ve been salary the past ten years. Most of that has been bullshit “unlimited PTO”, which means you can ask for as much time off as your supervisor/manager will permit. Unsurprisingly, it’s a broken, unfair vacation system that panders to favored employees and intimidates everyone else. The times where I’ve had _paid_ PTO, time off was calculated not by _hour_ but by either 1/2 (4hr) or 1/4 (2hr) day. You didn’t have the option to take only an hour, much less 15 or 30 mins. The flip side for both systems (paid and unlimited) was occasionally leaving 30 mins early was never a big deal, and simply wasn’t reported as PTO. Shifting work hours an hour early or late, especially to facilitate child care was common.
it’s crazy there are companies which make you book time for leaving 30 mins early once for an appointment
In my country, the minimum is half a day. It’s stated like that by law, so noone offers anything else.
HR/Payroll coordinator here, past district/regional management before that. Most systems are not designed to accept anything under an hour, because, they aren’t? I don’t have a good answer on that. The second answer is- if my team needs to leave a little bit early for an appointment I literally would never ask them to use PTO I’d tell them to just leave so it’s not something that comes up often.
Why would you even bother taking PTO to leave 30 minutes early? Just… leave.
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