How Does Your Company Manage Your Personal Time?

In my observations comp time is basically a thing of the past, particularly on an accounting basis. Generally, if someone works the expected 50-60 hours per week on a regular basis then an afternoon off on occasion will be forgiven.

When I worked for a large corporation vacation plans were generally put into chaos by whatever crisis was rearing its ugly head. Then, as you've noticed, the crisis was either solved or averted and the vacation came off as planned. I always wondered why people had to be put through that crap but it seemed pervasive. My honeymoon was put at risk because of a potential crisis. I refused to play the game and brought someone else into the loop immediately.

When my husband joined a large company he was given a cell phone and was told that he was expected to be available 24/7/365. It was like a leash. He hated that culture and was unhappy in that job (he didn't stay there long).

I think what you're seeing is becoming more and more commonplace -- particularly in larger companies. Employees are oftentimes seen as a replaceable commodity and come to feel the same way about themselves.

just wait for the future, im sure it will only et more corporate and more slave-like.

i finally have weekends off, they took them back now i have them again.
how long until they take them away again?

i hate when i schedule a dental appointment, doc visit, vet visit, shopping , whatever, they always stroll in 5 minutes before i get off and say " we NEED you to stay!!!"

well i damn well NEED TO HAVE THIS ******* TOOTH REMOVED FROM MY SKULL GODAMNIT!!!

and to top it off, they gave me a fake ******* twenty dollar bill and i couldnt buy a month bus pass.

and they owe me overtme from 5 months ago, and all my management does is sit in their office and add up hours, then tell me they patrol the floor and walk around every hour, when he just came back from a 2 month "paid medical leave" (i wouldnt get paid leave if i had a ******* bullet in my chest, and he gets 2 months for A SINUS INFECTION??!?!?!)

i have seen my director on time, about 3 months out of 9 months on the job.and then only at work 75% of the time.

then he goes ON VACATION AFTER A WEEK OF WORKING AGAIN.

and then i think when a future employer asks me about my previous managers, I HAVE TO COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY LIE MY ASS OFF!

oh joy, isnt the system wonderful?

Why is there an expectation of 50-60 hours/week?

That is excessive in my opinion. When do you eat?

i haven't been asked to work on the weekend in years.

in a crunch i might do it voluntarily, but i rarely work more than 40 hrs/week.


the guy across the aisle is a workaholic who routinely puts in 55-65 hours/week; he only gets paid for 40.

his supervisor doesn't want him to work that much, but he does it anyway...

It has a lot to do with the economy and job security.

Good, high-paying jobs are very rare. If you have one, people will do what it takes to keep it because they know there isn't anything better out there, and won't be for a very long time.

Some employers know this and take advantage of it.


Some employees know this and take advantage of it.

I work for a smallish company; they're great about paid time off and vacations.

I've only worked one weekend in the last six months, which was for a major E-mail conversion.

Re: How Does Your Company Manage Your Personal Time?


First off, I'm sorry to read this. It must suck.

When I was auditing, I had something similar. It was a lot of travel, and every year we were expected to do more (yet charge less time and for less expensive travel, yeah, right!). It ran my life, and RP's, because he was tied to me being home, or not, when it came to making his own plans.

Planning was the most ridiculous thing. My mother would call, wanting to know if she and my Dad could come up for a weekend, and it would have to be for months in advance. I kept a calendar for something like 6 months in advance no matter what time of year it was. Of course at the end of the year there was a crunch to get things done but I also worked for a company with a "use it or lose it" vacation policy. This basically meant that I was doing catchup work on vacation days. I also worked late nights auditing and did a lot of beginning of the week traveling on Sundays. I got to know Logan Airport way too damned well.

The only way I got out of that was when they decided it was too expensive to get me out there auditing and would be cheaper for me to be a business analyst. I drove some of that by getting good at Excel, but it was also a lot of lucky circumstances, e. g. the BA quit, another BA didn't work out, plus they were trying to get away from on-site auditing and were trying to favor two other auditors. It also didn't hurt that the supervisor who really disliked me had moved on to another department.

However, once I got to be a BA, I had an even more enormous amount of catchup work to do, except I wasn't traveling. I would walk in the door at 6 AM pretty much every day and then not leave until 5 or 6 PM. Every freakin' day. I was also not paid any comp time. I took a lot of abuse, too, and was taken for granted at nearly every turn.

After a year of busting my hump even more than usual, I did not get a raise and was busted a salary grade. This was not a pay cut but was another excuse to not give me a raise. Dot-coms were booming and I knew I had decent IT skills so I put myself together (new resume, new suits, new glasses, etc.) and went out and got another job. I recall my boss being surprised that I was leaving. What a maroon. He had no concept whatsoever that I was miserable or could possibly want (or do) anything better.

It may seem like I wasted my time there (I was there for five years, all told), but the reality is that I actually spent the time pretty well. I spent it converting over from a business side lawyer to an IT side data analyst/business analyst. I learned a major database skill, I got good at office programs like Excel and Word and I established myself here in Massachusetts and got some resume mileage in New England that I hadn't had before.

One thing that kept me going was doing whatever I could to improve myself. If the company pays for training, I say, take it. Almost no matter what it is. It's a benefit you're entitled to, plus it may help you move away from your current position, whether it's in that company or in a different one. It's also, I suspect, more palatable than working for what are clearly disorganized bosses.

You said that "sometimes [weekends and holidays] are the only times we can get time to do what we need to do." Is that because there's sitting around time during the week, or is the week really busy and the weekends etc. are the only time when anyone can actually hear themselves think? Aside from the above job I talked about, I've occasionally worked weekends and holidays in my life, but it was usually either for me to catch up on something or to cover if there was something really big happening. E. g. if something was due at the end of this quarter that was very large, I'd expect to probably work Xmas week and maybe even Xmas Day.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is if it's due to workflow or due to understaffing or some combination or due to something else. Can't do a lot about understaffing if the company won't commit to hurling more bodies at a problem, but sometimes the thing to do is not rescue the company. E. g. if the work takes four people and two people are pulling double time to get the work done (and the work is getting done), the company will think hey, that's great, we can get it done with two people! But if the two people instead balk and try to live normal lives, even with a little OT going on, the company will see (or at least they should) that only two people just ain't enough.

If it's workflow, then my only idea is to maybe see if there's another way to get work delivered to you. E. g. if your boss is a disorganized middleman when it comes to work, maybe see if you can bypass the boss and get the work directly from whoever provides it? One thing I've done with my current boss is, she might say she's going to contact someone to give me something to do, and I'll step in and volunteer and tell her, no, I'll make the call. That way I get the work faster and presumably I have a better understanding of it as it's not being filtered through her.

Anyway, in the absence of more information, those are my ideas. And, again, I'm sorry this is happening.

I am a systems administrator. Working the occasional weekend to take servers down isn't that big of a deal. But when it's every weekend... often at the last minute, and 24x7 coverage expectations... it gets old. There are no scheduled outages except if something else has to be done - like facilities crap, we get little or no input. We are treated like line workers - I have a BS degree from a fairly prestigious university and 23 years of experience - never have I been treated like this before. We are about half the staff that we really need to do our jobs effectively and on time.

[/rant]

Then it's probably time to start looking, at least a little. You'll probably feel better if you can say honestly that you're doing something to get out of the situation, even if it doesn't come to anything. I looked on Monster and found a few sys admin jobs in Detroit (couldn't recall which city you're in). Or you could look outside Michigan, of course.

Anyway, that's what I would do. The late nights and 24/7 up time kinda come with the territory, as do at least some weekends (for a sys admin job, as you are well aware), but the understaffing thing is, I'm sure, not what you signed on for.

I personally despise job hunting but when the situation becomes intolerable, it's gotta be done. Hope this helps.

Or, maybe he's not necessarily a workaholic but he's hired on @ 40 hours when the job requires 60. I've been there before, particularly when I was an independent contractor.

The understaffing could present opportunities, though.