How to manage holiday time-off in your small business
By Alex Yohn
Oct 7, 2016
Kin has spent some time deep-diving into paid time-off policies, from talking about what you need to know about the basics to how to create them. In this post, we’re going to take a look at how to manage time off around the holidays in a way that supports your employees while not ignoring your business needs.
Payroll is a fixed expense for which you have an allotted budget. And, holidays occur on specific days each year—so they aren’t going to be a surprise. Providing your employees with at least a few paid holidays is a standard benefit that isn’t too costly to businesses—and it feels great to offer this work-life balance perk to employees.
But when looking at what your time-off policy will provide, it’s important to consider what you will and won’t cover in regards to both mandatory and voluntary time off. To limit time-off headaches, have a well-defined policy, set clear expectations, and put a system in place for managing the time-off. If you don’t address these holiday time-off basics, you could find yourself without the staff you need at a critical time.
Voluntary time off
Time off falls into two categories: mandatory and voluntary, holiday time off falls into the latter. Voluntary time-off isn’t required by law, although some employers may be required by a labor union’s agreement to offer some types of voluntary time off. Some states may require specific holidays. Check out the SHRM State Chart: Holiday Leave Laws for a chart of legal requirements in specific states.
In addition to holidays, common types of voluntary time-off include:
• Vacation
• Personal days
• Bereavement
• Sick leave
Small business holiday time-off policies
About 68% of small businesses provide paid holidays as well as vacation time-off for employees, according to the National Compensation Survey, which collects data about workers with access to various benefits.
Drafting a holiday time-off policy that balances employee needs and business demands can be difficult, especially in businesses that are in continuous operation, or rarely close (e.g., manufacturing, restaurants, and retail). Holiday schedules also bring up questions regarding compensation challenges when you require employees to work on holidays.
To set expectations about your holiday time-off policy:
• Publish an annual list of holidays with the dates when your business will not be open and place it in your onboarding and/or employee handbook documents
• Identify any holidays on which you will be open, and how many employees will be required to keep operations running smoothly
• Consider any incentives you can offer (e.g., bonus holiday pay) to those who are required to work
Common holidays observed by businesses
One way to determine what holidays you will observe is by looking at the data for other organizations before you create the holiday schedule. According to a survey conducted by the International Foundation of Employee Benefits Plans, the top ten paid holidays offered by employers are:
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day (45%)
• Presidents’ Day (45%)
• Christmas Eve (49%)
• Friday after Thanksgiving (77%)
• Labor Day (95%)
• Memorial Day (97%)
• Independence Day (98%)
• Thanksgiving Day (98%)
• Christmas Day (98%)
• New Year’s Day (99%)
Floating holidays
Some employers offer paid “floating holidays” as a benefit. These days provide an employee with paid time off to observe a holiday which the company is not observing. According to the results of Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) 2014 Holiday Schedules Survey, just over one-third of employers offered floating holidays in 2014. Those that did so provided up to five floating holidays per year to full-time employees. Floating holidays can also serve as an employee engagement tool, as employees appreciate that you recognize their individual holiday needs.
“We noticed that birthdays were an incredible time waster,” said Alon Barzilay, founder and CEO of the Philadelphia-based real estate firm, Barzilay Development.
“The amount of energy spent secretly signing birthday cards, ordering cakes, and singing songs is welcomed, but most employees would prefer to take time off for their birthdays and spend it with their friends and family. By adding one more floating holiday, ‘your birthday,’ we’ve created a corporate culture that differentiates us from most other companies.”
Each business must evaluate what makes sense for their operations and their employees. You may want to consider offering a floating holiday to allow employees the opportunity to observe a holiday of their choice, rather than requiring them to take off an arbitrary day of your choice. And, for a business that earns a substantial portion of its revenue during the summer months, it may not be feasible to offer Independence Day as a paid holiday. Likewise, if you stay open during the winter holidays, you’ll need to make sure you have staff lined up to help manage business needs. If you identify staffing needs on a holiday, and make employees aware of any time-off restrictions in advance (during the recruiting and onboarding process), you’ll face fewer disgruntled employees when they’re scheduled to work on a holiday.
Technology helps small businesses manage time-off
Many small businesses struggle with finding a way to manage time off. Out of desperation, these companies often use inefficient methods such as email, spreadsheets, and sticky notes to handle time off requests, approvals, and tracking.
In those cases, technology can help. With an online system to manage and track time-off, confusion about approvals, time-off balances and questions about what holidays are included in the policy are no longer an issue. In fact, this is one of the many reasons we created Kin. It was a problem for us before Kin existed, too.
When using an online platform to manage and track paid time-off, employers can have access to individual data as well as an idea of how much time the entire employee population is using. You’re also able to view how many people will be out—before you approve a requests—so you won’t be surprised when you’re the only one who shows up for work! Kin gives employers real-time data to follow-up with employees about any time-off related issues.
While federal law doesn’t require an employer to provide paid (or unpaid) time-off to employees on nationally-recognized holidays, that doesn’t mean small business owners shouldn’t offer this benefit. When employees can take time off away from work to celebrate, relax and enjoy time with family and friends, it has a positive impact on employee engagement. If you create a well-defined holiday time-off policy, use the policy to set clear expectations, and track the time off in an effective way with HR technology, you’ll experience the many benefits of offering your employees time off to observe holidays.
An interview with the team at Doc4 LLCby Lindsay Sanders
Design team Doc4 LLC runs an organized studio where getting to know new members of the team quickly matters. Read on to learn more about how Doc4 works, what’s important to their culture, and how Kin helps them keep everything rolling.
Who are you, what’s your role, and your favorite hand-held food?
[DC] My name is Dale Crum and I am the Owner of Doc4 LLC. My favorite hand-held food would have to be the churro.
What’s the story of Doc4?
[DC] Doc4 was founded in 2005 by myself and Hunter Sanders. Our original intent was to set up shop as a print agency, but we quickly realized this wasn’t the direction the company was headed in when more than half of all incoming business was web-related. While the company has varied in size over the past decade, we are currently a small design team, partnered with a local development company (Mill Creek Software). Our office is located in a recently renovated 1920s feed store in the heart of the booming Northwest Arkansas region, in a town called Rogers.
As a design studio, we cover the ‘traditional’ print and brand design, though our focus has turned more toward web design, web application design, and mobile application design. We have been published in a number of periodicals and design inspiration books including LogoLounge and Make Magazine. Our work has crossed many mediums from business cards and billboards to mobile phones and video games. While we are versed in many mediums, we don’t claim to be masters of all design, but what we do know, we know well.
What’s great about working at Doc4?
[DC] Keeping the team small has a lot of advantages: we get to be a little more choosy with the clients we work with, which has led to some great relationships. We also get to know each other pretty well, which has been a lot of fun.
Please share some insight into Doc4 approach to employee and workplace operations. How has Kin played a role?
[DC] While a lot of design studios pride themselves on irregular hours and lax schedules, we’ve always preferred to run a slightly tighter ship – it helps our customers know what to expect (and when to expect it). Kin has been a great resource for us as a company. We utilize Kin’s onboarding process which helps new recruits get to know other employees as well as understand what is expected during their first few days. We feel it allows for a much smoother transition, helping everyone involved to feel more comfortable. We also use Kin to keep track of software and hardware. We use it similarly to a library checkout system which make it easier to find all of the monitors, trackpads, product licenses, and mice.
Anything notable going on lately?
[DC] We are about to launch a redesign of our website and newsletter in the coming months – our first updates in several years! We’ll also have a dozen or more new projects added to our portfolio when the site launches and we’re excited for everyone to get to see all the new work.
By Alex Yohn
Sep 22, 2016
Recruiting company, SATIGO, has managed quick growth plus a complete rebrand in the past year which is no easy feat. Read on to learn how Kin helped them keep their people data in check as they went full-steam ahead.
Who are you, what’s your role, and your favorite hand-held food?
[PF] My name is Pauline Frey, and I am the Operations Manager here at SATIGO. My favorite hand-held food is definitely a chicken wrap!
What’s the story of SATIGO?
[PF] SATIGO is an IT recruitment company based in London (in the Gherkin). SATIGO was created by Nabil Dar in his bedroom in 2010. It was called the Virtual Recruiter back then. After a lot of coffees and meetings we achieved the near impossible for a startup, a big win in the form of a full UK resourcing managed service for a glob data center consulting business. After we won a few awards and experienced constant growth, we decided to refresh the brand this year. Exciting times ahead! Our team is currently composed of 20 people and we plan to be up to 25 in January 2017.
What’s great about working at SATIGO?
[PF] Well, as sellers we’re basically young , crazy, and noisy. But we make revenue! Our office has a work hard, play hard environment, inside of which employees are regularly rewarded by special events (we learned to play Polo two weeks ago!), lunch at nice restaurants, internal competitions, and obviously a CRAZY Xmas party. Recently we organised an awards ceremony where we celebrate the successes of everyone, have a little dance, ring the victory bell, and elect the employee of the month around a glass of champagne.
Please share some insight into SATIGO’s approach to employee and workplace operations. How has Kin played a role?
[PF] As an IT recruitment business, we’re always the first to use an online tool for our day-to-day tasks. We even built our own CRM! Using a platform to deal with our HR tasks seemed obvious, and we’re very happy with Kin. The app allows the different key roles in our company to manage what they need to: finance manager for time off and legal documents, operations manager for the on-boarding process, managing director to create the profiles, etc. The more we grow, the more Kin will be useful for us as this is a great way to centralize all the HR tasks in one online platform. The new functionalities to come are also very exciting for us: the online signature and the exit tasks will be greatly used.
Anything notable going on lately?
[PF] A few months ago we launched our new brand: new logo, new colors and new website! We also released a new platform called BENCH: it allows clients to find Bench certified contractors (verified by us) by filtering by skills, availability, rate, etc.
SATIGO is looking for new faces to fill to join the team. If you’re hard-working (and crazy!) enough to be a part of it, take a look at our open positions. We’re always recruiting!
An interview with the team at Blancby Lindsay Sanders
Blanc is a digital agency committed to changing the world. They’ve built major projects that have helped more than 3.3MM people throughout the years, and are entering their busiest season yet. Read on to learn how Blanc keeps important digital projects going strong, while Kin keeps their employee management and growth in check.
Who are you, what’s your role, and your favorite hand-held food?
[SH] I’m Steve Hawkes, Co-Founder of Blanc. It’s a tough call, but I think a sushi hand roll just edges out a burrito — it’s got the satisfyingly simple construction of the burrito, whilst being lighter and more refined experience. Paul, my co-founder, would disagree. Either way… I’m hungry now.
What’s the story of Blanc?
[SH] We were founded in 2010 when Paul and I merged our two agencies into one studio (largely to simplify this story) after working super closely on a number of projects. Over the years we’ve felt happiest and most engaged whilst working with NGOs as they align really well with our world view. So we made the decision just over a year ago to focus on helping them change the world, crafting one digital project at a time.
We’re growing steadily and now have a great team of 9 people, all designers or developers. Together we ship Django-based web projects from conception and design through to deployment and maintenance.
What’s great about working at Blanc?
[SH] I’m super proud to be a part of Blanc, not just because of the great projects we ship, which in many cases do fall into the change the world category, but genuinely because we have a fantastic team. We love solving problems, the trickier the better. That’s why we love working with NGOs, they bring us really great problems to solve with a massive impact. Our team is a mix of designers and developers who have mutual respect for each other’s process, we’re all focused on collaborating together and with the client until we find a great solution.
In terms of studio awesomeness, we’ve surrounded ourselves with pet projects – everything from a DIY EggBot printer, to any number of RaspberryPi and Micro:bit powered gadgets. Our favorite is a converted flip-dot display from a bus that we use to highlight team events, playing songs on the web-based jukebox or comedy word of the moment, and team stats to make all the online apps we use a little more real. One small problem solved.
Please share some insight into Blanc’s approach to employee and workplace operations. How has Kin played a role?
[SH] Autonomy, mastery and purpose are a big focus for us. Autonomy, because we’ve found that when we empower the team members to make their own decisions, we flourish. Mastery, because in identifying our strengths and providing opportunities to develop them, we grow experts rather than workers. And purpose, because we all need motivations beyond paying the bills – our clients, our work with them, and the difference we make in the world gives us that.
“We try and fight the conventional corporate culture that tries to creep into any company and we find Kin helps us keep everything human.”
As a result, we rarely talk about pushing performance, but instead how we can flow better together. Kin’s been at the centre of the conversation, from giving autonomy over holiday management to making space to listen to how we can help everyone progress and grow. We try and fight the conventional corporate culture that tries to creep into any company and we find Kin helps us keep everything human. It takes care of all the drudgery so we can get back to our passion.
Anything notable going on lately?
[SH] We’ve got a huge amount going on as this last quarter has been our busiest! We donate 1 in 10 of our projects to a worthy organization that otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford our services, free of charge, and our latest is just about to go live. We’re also ramping up to launch some open-source tools which we think are going to make a big difference to the world, and the studio generally has some exciting jobs in progress in partnerships with Oxfam International, Civicus and Lumos. Overall, we’re rather excited about the impact they’re going to have.
By Alex Yohn
Sep 13, 2016
Attracting top talent in today’s competitive job market is no easy task. Nowadays, it’s no longer enough to simply write a compelling job description and hope for the best. With so many opportunities available to job seekers, your first step must be to ensure that your posting can be easily found in online search results.
Just as marketers try to optimize their web pages to rank highly in Google, savvy recruiters optimize their job postings to rank highly in job search engines when candidates do job searches. To get the most out of placing your job postings on major job boards, start thinking like a search engine and following best practices for search engine optimization, or SEO.
How does that work? To get the inside scoop on what employers can do to optimize their job descriptions, we sat down with the head engineer in charge of Glassdoor’s job search engine, Bhawna Singh, to learn more.
From our chat, we found six easy ways to jumpstart your posting performance immediately:
1. Make your job title easily searchable
Most job seekers search by job title, so knowing how to optimize your title is the first step to getting your job posting in front of qualified candidates. To perform well, keep your title straightforward and consistent with the language typically used in your industry. Steer clear of creative titles like “Excel Wizard” or “Coding Ninja,” as these tend to rank poorly compared to frequently searched titles like “Software Engineer.”
Another important point Singh stressed was that, “Glassdoor’s algorithm will rank your jobs higher if the job title closely matches what the user typed in the search box.” Despite what you may think from an immediate ‘incentive’ perspective, Singh makes it clear that, “Additional phrases in the title, like ‘apply now’ or ‘competitive salary,’ make it less likely that your job will match well to the user’s query. These types of modifiers are best saved for the job description.”
2. Watch your abbreviations
When it comes to abbreviations, most search engines are advanced enough to recognize commonly used abbreviations such as “Sr.” for “Senior” or “RN” for “Registered Nurse.” However, things start to get tricky when the same abbreviated term may be used among different positions in different industries. To prevent your description from getting advertised in the wrong place, make sure to expand your abbreviations to specify whether your “PA” job is referring to “Physician’s Assistant,” “Production Assistant,” “Personal Assistant,” or “Personal Accountant.”
3. Keep location out of the job title
Unlike search engines such as Google or Bing, which filter queries through a single generic search field, all major job search sites feature two fields, one for job title and the other for location. When these search engines try to match your job to the user’s query, they match title-to-title and location-to-location.
Users search for specific job titles more than any other group or combination, including location. If your job title is “Assistant Manager North Canton Store” and your location is “North Canton, OH,” including the location within the job title only makes it a less exact match to a job seeker’s query of “Assistant Manager.” To help boost click-through rate, ditch redundant information like location so that your title will more precisely mirror what the job seeker is searching for.
4. Front-load your title
A 2014 eye tracking study conducted by Mediative revealed that the way people view search results differs from the way we read other kinds of text. As opposed to reading a piece of text line by line from left to right, people consume search results vertically, scanning the beginning portion of results from top to bottom. Applying this to job search results, job seekers scanning through dozens of job results are likely to view just a fraction of job titles, focusing their attention at the beginning.
To make sure that important pieces of information don’t get passed over, orient your job titles so that the most relevant words fall within the scanning window of the first 1-2 words. In the image below, you’ll find an example of a job title not optimized for search result viewing. Because the first two words don’t include any job title related terms, it’s more likely that a job seeker will skip over it. Avoid this mistake by beginning your title with the most pertinent words.
5. Keep an eye on character count
When crafting the right title for your job posting, it’s useful to keep length in mind. Singh says at Glassdoor, the job search engineering team has found among the site’s millions of job postings, the most typical length for a job title is between 12-20 characters. What’s more, titles within this range also have the highest click-through rate. Think titles like Product Manager (15 characters); Sales Associate (15 characters); Business Analyst (16 characters); and Non CDL Truck Driver (20 characters).
If your title’s character count falls on either extreme of the range, you run the risk of experiencing a significant decrease in your number of click-throughs. For example, on Glassdoor, job titles over 60 characters get clicked on about half as often as titles in the 10-20 character range.
If this is the case for you, consider either shortening or extending your job title to fit within the 12-20 character range. Look into what titles are most commonly used in your industry for the level and skill you’re looking for. If you’re worried about your title not being detailed enough, remember that you can always provide more detail later on in the description.
6. Formatting matters… a lot
Job seekers tend to skim job descriptions, so it’s crucial that yours is easy to digest. However, beyond simply making your description easy on the eyes, there is an SEO incentive around formatting as well.
“Good search engines take into account the quality of the job title and description. Misspellings and bad formatting can negatively impact how your job ranks,” Singh said.
To give your description a well-defined structure, break up your text with separate paragraphs, section headings, and bullet points where appropriate.
Paying close attention to formatting is particularly important when advertising the same job on multiple sites. Be cautious when copying and pasting descriptions that your posting doesn’t convert into a single blob of text.
Singh advises, “If you’re using multiple sites, it’s always a best practice to check how the formatting of each one looks.” Be aware that some job boards do a poor job of preserving your original formatting, which will reflect poorly on you as the employer.
When developing your job posting, remember that your goal is to craft job titles and descriptions that will match a job seeker’s search query as closely as possible. Try putting yourself in their shoes and think about how you would conduct a job search for your particular position. The more you can imitate the way job seekers interact with search engines, the better your job posting will perform.
By Alex Yohn
Sep 12, 2016
As an employer, you want a team that’s motivated and productive at the workplace. Providing ample time off allows employees to stay refreshed and have a good work-life balance, thus performing their best at work.
As you begin to create a policy for paid time off, keep in mind that PTO is a piece of an employee’s compensation package. This makes it even more important to have a well-communicated policy in place. Not only is it important to your existing employees to have an easy-to-understand policy, but also to any potential candidates joining your company.
In this post, you’ll find a quick overview on the following:
There are a variety of policies that can work for any one company, but no matter which policy is implemented it must be fair to the employees and the employer. Time-off policies tend to fall into one of three types:
Upfront policies: employees receive a fixed number of days at the beginning of a work year. Accrual policies: employees earn a set amount of time on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Unlimited policies: employees aren’t given a fixed number of days to use, rather they can use as much time as they’d like.
On top of policy types, there are a couple of additional configurations for a time-off policy you’ll want to set. Two major pieces to think about are when a policy renews and carryover time. Policies are commonly renewed on the first of the year, an employee’s anniversary date, or a custom date, such as the company’s fiscal year. On this date, an employee’s balance will reset and any applicable carryover will be applied.
Carryover is the amount of time an employee is able to transfer over to a new year’s balance. For example, if a policy allows for up to five days of carryover and an employee has eight days left in their balance at the end of the year, they’d carryover a total of five days to the new year and would lose the remaining three days.
You’re probably now thinking, “what policy is best for my team?”
Here are some things to consider to help you make that decision:
Studies have shown that employees with a “use it or lose it” time off policy are more likely to use all of their given time. When policies leave room for ambiguity, such as when vacation days are unlimited and go untracked, employees tend to err on the side of appearing industrious. Thus, they may not take any time or little time off as possible.
A great place to start is by gathering your team’s feedback on a time-off policy. Have a conversation, check-in, or even send a survey to get a feel of what they value and see as fair in terms of paid time off.
Now that you know the different types of policies, let’s talk about the different categories of time off you can track. For many years, the trend for providing time off was to give a “bank” of time the employee can use for personal, vacation, and sick leave. However in recent years, many states have passed laws regulating company sick leave policies. That being said, breaking out the different time off categories into their own policies is your best bet! Breaking out the categories will not only keep you compliant with your state’s laws, but you’ll also have a wealth of valuable data to review for trends and usage of the time used.
Once you’ve identified the different types and categories of time-off policies you’ll be implementing, you’ll need to determine how much time to actually give per category and as a whole. It’s up to each individual company to determine how many days off an employee receives, and how the time is given.
Not sure how much time to provide to employees? Here’s some info to help you get started:
Studies have shown that ¾ of small businesses give employees 10 days or less for vacation/holiday time, whereas Kin’s customer base averages to about 12 days per year.
It’s also very common to have different “levels” of time off for vacation/holiday policies, typically based on how long an employee’s been with the company. For example, employees at the company for 1 year get 10 days, 2-4 years get 15 days, 5+ years get 20 days, etc.
For sick leave, be sure to check out the laws for your state. It’ll likely outline how much time you must provide.
Creating a policy that is clear and all employees understand is the goal. This will alleviate any questions/concerns the employee has and will also show your company is organized and professional.
So, where do you start? Answer these questions to get a time off policy started:
Who’s eligible for time off?
How much time off is provided?
How does the time accumulate for employees?
Can unused time be carried over to the next year?
Is there a waiting period for new employees to request time off?
How is time off requested?
If you do decide that an unlimited time off policy is best for your company, there are two things necessary for unlimited time off policies to work.
Tracking time used: You’ll still need to track each employees’ time taken so your team can know who will be off and when. Tracking also helps you understand how expensive the policy is to your company, and communicates to your team that you want to make sure they’re taking enough time off.
Trust: For this type of policy to be successful, your company culture must have trust baked into it. You’re trusting employees to use time off responsibly, and employees are trusting you that it’s okay and encouraged to take time off.
Once you have your policy created, add it to your company handbook and share it with the team. Include a message with information on why you’ve created/updated the policy, or better yet, have a pow-wow with the team to chat about it together.
Don’t have a company handbook? Well, now you have one started! In the meantime, share the new time off policy with the team so they know what to expect.
Organization and communication are key to managing employee time off requests. Having a clear process on how requesting time off works at your company will tackle both.
You may think it’s simple and obvious, but outlining this process can help eliminate confusion for employees, and the easier it is, the more likely are they to request the time.
Let’s start with who will be responding to employee time off requests. Is it a direct manager, office manager, HR manager? Identify this person so the employee knows who to send their requests to.
Next, what happens once a request is approved? Having a team calendar showing when co-workers will be out of the office is very beneficial for small companies. This way everyone is aware and able to accommodate a teammate’s absence.
How Companies Can Encourage Employees to Take Time Off
A company’s leaders ultimately need to set the tone for the company’s time off policy. This includes ensuring everyone takes their allotted time off and fostering a culture that doesn’t make people feel hesitant to take their vacation days.
Let’s talk about three ways you can go about this:
1. Create a pro-vacation environment. Managers typically have a good feel on how their team is doing. If you notice an employee seeming worn out, encourage them to take some time off to reboot. Additionally, when an employee is taking time off they should be completely disconnected from from their job – not checking emails, taking calls, etc. You can’t reboot if you’re still plugged-in at work! 2. Company leaders should go public with their own time off. When leaders are public about taking time off and taking it in long stretches, employees can see that taking time won’t negatively affect how they’re viewed at the company. 3. Give employees a minimum. Companies with unlimited time off policies seem to have found success by mandating that employees take a minimum number of days.
Kin has been through several policy changes throughout our time, and we wanted to share our take on the unlimited versus set time off policy.
We used to have unlimited time off and did a pretty poor job of getting folks out of the office. We’ve since moved to a staggered (and generous) time-off policy that gives our team ample time to get out of the office, but also a means of understanding that it’s part of their compensation. That’s why it’s called paid time off, after all.
Moral of the story? Even if you give unlimited time off to your team, make sure you track how much folks are taking and, just as important, ensure there’s a good amount of communication about when folks are taking time off by using a team calendar. It keeps your team informed and fresh, and it paints a better financial picture of your company’s performance.
Still interested in learning more about PTO? Check out some of Kin’s other posts about it:
