Sometimes company’s make the weirdest policies, but that’s okay because some people are clever enough to find their way around it!

What would you do if you had accumulated a lot of vacation time at work but didn’t want to take it all off at once? If you were going to lose the vacation days if you didn’t take them, would you find another way to get your company to work with you on other alternatives?

This guy shares his vacation story and it is not disappointing!

You have to use your vacation days

In fact, for context, this takes place in The Netherlands, which has a very different working culture and legislation than the US.

Recently I got a message from HR that I still had a lot of holiday hours open, many of which would lapse as of July first, as a matter of law.

I was aware of this, but in the past I was always able to sell them for money. In the COVID years I’ve hardly been away for mostly obvious reasons, and I’m getting 32 days per annum.

In other words, my vacation days had piled up and my current balance was a grand total of 390 hours, and that’s excluding the new 32 days from 2023.. So, that’s almost 10 weeks of holidays.

UH OH!

Of these, I had to finish roughly 200 hours, or 5 weeks before July 1. Possible of course, but hardly ideal. Not for my employer, our customer, or for myself.

Which is why I thought it wouldn’t be a problem to “sell” these hours for extra salary, as I had done before.

But I was quite wrong.. HR told me to contact my manager, who denied my request.

I explained to him exactly how many days I had still open.

He’d ask the CEO but the CEO sent me a message about how they care about work-life balance and mental health etc.

He explains the employment landscape…

For the record, I fully agree with this stance in principle, and frankly, I think the measly amount of holidays people in the US get is shameful.

And the culture in which it’s sort of “not done” to actually take your holidays, I find outright toxic. I’m glad I’m working in a country and for an employer where this situation is much better.

But on the other hand, one has to be practical. Covid was inflicted upon us all, and you can’t compensate for a lack of holidays taken in the past, with taking copious amounts of holidays now or in the near future.

I love to travel and to socialise, but I/we couldn’t go anywhere or do much, and I didn’t see the point in taking holidays just to sit home more.

He knew things were getting out of hand.

In fact, my work provided me with some much needed structure during the lockdown times. And working from home meant that work was actually much more stress-free than it was in the office.

So anyway, I brought up my situation and my reasoning but it was still denied. I was just told it’s good to take off some days, and to go on holiday, and so on.

Again, I’m not opposed to this at all, but the scale of the “problem” seemed to have just escaped the manager and the CEO.

This is where he decided to act!

I had and have already planned on traveling for 2 weeks (to Sicily and Greece, if anyone’s interested, maybe also mainland Italy again), but after that I’d still have 3 weeks which I’d need to finish..

I also have a long weekend planned to Iceland, but that only takes several paid holidays because of the weekend in the middle.

It is then that I decided to start complying maliciously. Instead of trying to argue the point again with my CEO, I planned a meeting with my line manager and the account manager of the customer I am working for.

I told them I wanted/needed to take every Friday off basically until July or my days would lapse.

He was being very clever with his scheme…

I didn’t ask for permission because whilst paying out holidays is voluntarily, they need a very good excuse to deny leave requests (such as denying requests for key figures last minute when you’re in the middle of a big project with deadlines etc), but my request wasn’t one of those, and obviously they’re not allowed to deny a payout AND my leave request anyway.

It’d be super hypocritical too.

So as a good and diligent employee, I wanted to make sure that our customer was aware of my sustained de facto reduction in capacity and wanted to discuss how we could best bring up this potentially touchy subject with them.

He knew he had them this time!

After all, this structural reduction of capacity is different from a normal 2 week vacation or just some days off here and there, which is a pretty normal situation here, even for contractors.

Since they’re a key account and I’m working for them as a senior DevOps/Cloud Engineer, I had anticipated to have a slightly awkward meeting with my manager and the account manager discussing the details, after which I already half expected they’d U-turn at some point and decide to pay out my vacation days after all.

But they exceeded expectations because when I entered the meeting, not a word was spoken about my 2 denied requests for converting my holidays, or about the framing I had given this meeting about how and who wanted the honour of telling the big customer they’d be losing 20% of my capacity (and my employer would get to charge 20% less).

The cherry on top!

Instead, the account manager just asked for how many days I still had open, which we were easily able to see in the system.

He then proposed to just pay out all my open holidays from 2022 and before (so 10 weeks instead of the requested 5), so the “backlog” would be cleared and this situation wouldn’t occur again.

Happy days, I have already received 2,5 months extra in salary and I still have all my 32 days from this year, so I have more than enough days for my holidays and for general R&R, so my work-life balance is really not in danger.

YIKES! That sounds like an interesting plan!

This guy knew how to tackle his office policy, but let’s find what people on Reddit thought.

This user shares how things went down with their manager.

This user shares what they’re thinking of doing with their leave.

This user shares how he benefits with leave.

That’s right! This user knows this guy played it well.

This user shares their dad’s retirement story.

It’s better to use the paid time off than to lose it!

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.