Maybe it is a little too soon for this question, but I'm interested to hear if anyone's organisation enforces a compulsory shut-down between Christmas and New Year, particularly in the Pharma/Life Sciences sector, but generally interested in how all companies manage a business wide shut-down if one is in place.
My organisation tries to do this globally, but local practice differs. In the US, it is typically four days off between Xmas and New Year (company takes the hit) while in the UK four days are split 50/50 between the employee needing to take two days from their own leave and the company funding two.
Also, in countries where Christmas is not a cultural holiday some funding of days is allowed at other festival times (Chinese New Year, etc). In all organisations I have worked where a shutdown has been in place it has always been a challenge with Finance and sometimes IT. The Xmas period is often a year-end accounting challenge and IT like to roll out system wide updates during "quiet periods”. Consequently, 'business critical roles' are seen as exempt from any compulsory shutdown. Really keen to understand your practices if relevant. TIA.
Hi Gerard,
I work at Illumina which is in the Life Sciences sector. We enforce a company shut down between Christmas and New year. Employees are required to use leave within this period - aside from the "bank holiday" days in the UK/Europe such as Christmas and New year day. We have flexible time off, which means you can go above your contractual allowance, so this helps a little with the leave element. There are always some functions which require to work during this period, and this is managed appropriately via management and we try to ensure they have other time off to compensate for this. We also have an "On Call" policy for certain functions (IT) which may need to be available but not necessarily working.
I'm a bit late to the game, but hopefully my answer will still be useful to you. I work at a CRO mainly focused on gastro with just over 500 EE's, HQ'd in Canada but with staff in the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany, Romania, Poland, Hungary, and Australia as well. I feel that overall, a Christmas shut down is very normal in the pharma/life sciences industry, however they may manage it in the background.
We've been closed between Christmas and New Year with no requirement for EE's to use vacation days for as long as our people can remember, but it used to be contingent on our financial situation that year. This year we've removed this contingency for a few reasons: we've never not had the shut down even in very difficult years, most of our sponsors have shut downs as well, a non-contingent shut down is easier to plan around for our EE's and managers, etc.
We're fairly small so we haven't really had issues with certain roles being exempt from the shut down. We do have some customer service and IT people on call each year, but the message is pretty clear that they are only to be contacted in case of emergency - since most EE's should be off it should only be sponsors reaching out, anyways.
EE'swho would like to work during the shut down for whatever reason are welcome to work this out with their managers and take the time off elsewhere - that's usually a pretty informal process between the EE and their manager, without HR interference. We've seen requests like that from people who e.g. don't celebrate Christmas, prefer to take the extra time around Thanksgiving, and once from a person who had recently lost their spouse and didn't want to "just sit at home". We do find that people who don't celebrate Christmas will volunteer for the on call shifts more - they then take that time off during other cultural holidays that are not stat holidays.
In short: my experience is the more casual/flexible the process is, the better!
I work in technology, we close between christmas and new year, 3 days of your contracted annual leave must be kept for this period. The days are entered into our HR system at the start of the year so this does't get forgotten about.
Thanks Amanda.