One thing that riles any boss, especially during times of economic hardship, is providing unnecessary concessions or time off to their most expensive resource, their staff. It’s the age old battle of an employer who tries to get the most out of an employee at the least possible cost, and an employee who is determined to get the most reward for the least amount of work.
I first came across this memo from an employer to his employee years and years ago, and hadn’t seen it again until this week – and thought it was still an excellent piece of diplomacy. I must remind myself to use it some time.
MEMORANDUM
From: Team Leader
To: (Enter employee’s name here)
Subject: Your request for a day off work
Thank you for submitting a request for a day off work. I’m concerned though, that you haven’t looked at things from my point of view, so I think it’s important to examine what you’re asking for.
There are 365 days in a year, and out of these, you only work during the week, leaving us with only 261 available working days.
Out of these 261 days, you are only theoretically available to the company for at most 8 hours a day. If you take the rest of the 16 hours a day as a whole and calculate them into days, then you don’t work for another 174 days, technically leaving you with 87 working days in a year.
If we then subtract all public holidays and the period between Christmas and new year when the company is not open for business, you will see that you only have 74 working days.
We haven’t even considered the time that you have off for lunch, tea and coffee breaks in the morning and afternoon, and the down time that you have for chit chat and office gossip. Take all these in totality through the year, and you effectively have 52 working days left to offer the company.
You will also be aware that the company has a policy of setting aside 1 day a month for staff training. Add to this, the time you spent travelling during the day to and from company clients, and we clearly see that there’s at least another 24 days down time through the year, technically leaving us with 28 working days.
Now, I’m reliably told by the folks in the IT department that on average, you spend 30 to 45 minutes a day browsing websites that have nothing to do with why we employ you. We don’t want you to consider us anal, so we normally overlook this sort of down time for most employees, but give or take, I suggest that this leaves us with 26 working days in a year.
Apparently, the government requires that we give you a mandatory 25 days off work for annual leave, leaving you with only one working day in the year.
I’LL BE DAMNED IF THAT’S THE DAY YOU HAVE IN MIND!
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