You mean they’re getting tired of doing it in front of me???
It’s more fun when you don’t hear it directly from them.
Maybe they don’t want to pay a large lump sum in lieu of leave or they don’t want you to accumulate too much leave and then take it all at once.
Yeah, that may be it.
I didn’t really know how much I’d built up until they sent this out.
Work Life balance is the new BS every HR manager in Taiwan goes on about. It used to be LOHAS. Just tell them your work is your life and you’d rather die than dessert your post. They’ll make you employee of the month.
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Because you get warned before you lose it. He’s giving you a last warning then it becomes his.
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If they need to pay for leaves that were unused for a certain amount of time, then that’s probably why. If you don’t want to take the leave, and it’s in writing that you still get them converted to cash if unused, then take that option instead. It’s like getting some bonus–which is probably what HR is trying to avoid, hehe.
Yeah, in June I also got a payout for 10 days not used. HR here also sent me an email beforehand recommending that I take them. It also included motivations about good health and shit.
Guess they really want you to reconsider taking them days before they need to pay up.
We do not get paid for the days we do not take off. They do give us incentives to do so, both carrot and stick.
Carrot: vacation allowance. We cannot spend it as we please but the choices are not bad
Stick: they give you a lower score on your annual evaluation if you do not take your vacation days/spend your money.
This year we have been informed we couldn’t roll over our leave into next years first quarter like previous years.
The company claims there was a change in the law that doesn’t allow leave to be rolled over.
We suspect companies are obliged to make payment for leave not taken thereby everybody is strongly encurosged to use all leave in the year.
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https://www.monster.ca/career-advice/article/are-you-being-forced-to-take-a-vacation
I have seen managers compel members of their teams to take some vacation time when performance or behavioral issues begin to appear.
This second link was an interesting read.
I have friends in banking in- and outside Taiwan who are required to take leave and during that time off, company auditors can access their workspace/files. In some cases, this may be why the leave is required.
@rocket - any of these reasons - good and bad - may be why HR cares that you are not taking your leave. In the US, at least, a company is under no obligation to give vacation days under the law, unless vacation is written into an employment agreement (see link below). I guess this means vacation policies are to be treated as a benefit or incentive. In your particular case, you probably want to double-check your company’s leave policies as suggested above (carryover, conversion to cash) and act accordingly.
https://employment-law.freeadvice.com/employment-law/wage_and_hour/vacation-time-employee-rights.htm
Master @GooseEgg, many thanks for all the info.
As far as my company goes, this appears to be a widespread phenom at the moment.
Our shop is a fairly nominal 9 to 5 environment, there isn’t much of a Work Long Not Smart culture here (part of why I love it), and my sense is that people tend to sandbag their days mostly because they got nowhere to go and nothin to do (yeah, yeah, that could easily include yours truly).
My manager gave me the leave day policy in detail a couple years ago, but it may have changed.
At that time, established staff members got all unused leave rolled over to next year (hence my own accumulation). Payout in lieu of days normally only occurs when someone leaves the company, and may, in fact, not even be a choice if the company chooses (like revenues are down or something).
Related story, my job before here, you may or may not recall, was at a much larger corporation (everyone knows them).
When I quit there, after three miserable years, because of CNY timing and other problems, I ended up staying a couple weeks longer than I needed (or wanted!!) to.
In the quarters leading up to my departure, partly because they wanted me to quit, partly because fucking gangsters, there had been an escalating series of cases where the company manipulated various bonus/incentive deals to screw me out of a goodly amount of cash.
With 3 weeks left to go, IT cut off my Internet access (which I used daily in performance of my duties). When I pointed this out to my supervisor, he “suggested” that I take my accrued leave days and split after one week instead of 3.
I told him thanks but he could, alternatively, pound sand up his ass, that they’d already porked me out of enough dough and I’d be working my time out to the last second to maximize my cashout.
I am sorry to hear about how your time at your previous job ended up. And I hope you were able to make the most of it - although not having the Internet access that you needed to do your job may have made those final days feel very long indeed.
As I read your reply above, I realized that my company also is a pretty 9-to-6 operation and also not a Work Long Not Smart culture. There is one department that does hang out til 9pm regularly, and my buddies in HR (which happens to sit next to that team) think the manager of that team is an oddball. I actually tend to leave about 30 min later than I have to, so I can see what a ghost town my office becomes, except for that 9pm team.
Removing all doubt from whence you hail.
As always, sir, you’re far too kind.
All in all it wasn’t terrible.
Well, OK, it was kind of terrible, but it wasn’t unbearable.
I was, unfortunately, brought on as a kind of spearhead to a planned initiative that never really got any traction.
By the time I finished there, they had re-rigged the operation so there were 4 guys doing the same work as me in Shenzhen for about NT$20K/month each.
Needless to say, I was getting a lot more (a LOT more, TBH) than that, which made me pretty unpopular with management.
Any friggin ways, nobody died, I did get paid pretty good overall, it’s a pretty impressive CV entry, and working in Tucheng made me a lot more appreciative of garden spots like Zhonghe.
Yeah, there’s always some R&D/engineering guys around, no matter how late or early, but they’re actually working.
Also folks are frequently having con calls/Skype meetings with the US or Europe, so they have to match time zones.
Certainly, there’s none of that old school ga li gong office BS of the bookkeeper girls giving you the stinkeye when you book at 10 after 6, thank heavens.
That is one thing I love about working in Continental Europe. 37 working days of vacation a year…not bad 
OK, finally, after asking around, we got a little closure.
It ain’t just me.
Due to a combination of me being my department’s sole foreigner
and my group leader being somewhat…minimalist in terms of corporate trickledown, I’d been blissfully unaware that this is currently, as brother @the_bear says, a major HR paradigm at the moment.
Of course, I had to go and mention it to the Mrs, so now she’s on a friggin tirade for me to piss off and “sit on the beach and drink” somewhere for a week.
It never frigging stops.
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Tell her it is summer, all beaches destinations are fully booked, and ther ei sno chance in hell to get a ticket anywhere where you can sit and drink other than your living room.
OTOH, I have found tickets for Okinawa cruise, 5 days, 17k, all included. Now that sounds like a plan…
…in October.
I can’t agree more with this.
I think it really comes down to your manager on a lot of things. My old manager had no life, but work. She expected her team to put work on top of their list too. She even made up shit about other employees complaining about my behavior. Where in retrospect, no one had any issues with me…except her.
It got to the point where two of my co-workers had babies and came back the day after their maternity leave ended. They were afraid their jobs wouldn’t be vacant upon returning. Where ladies on the other teams took extra time with not a worry in sight.
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