How Do You Spend Your Holiday Paragraph

[Nayra Waddles]

Ive never had a problem with this. Early exits and late arrivals are covered by PTO approved by my manager and are registered in my time-sheet as such, all per company policy. Leaving early on the last day before a vacation is very common here and many colleagues, managers included, do so. Arriving late on the first day back isn't uncommon either.

Thanks to everybody for your help. I decided to send an email to my manager and his manager (who is in the office) to ask for a brief meeting on the topic (to be confirmed for the next Monday). After that I will go to the HR, I hope with my manager/his manager support

By and large, your employer doesn't get to dictate how you spend your time off. If you want to maximise your travel time during a holiday that's entirely up to you. While plenty of people like to spend the final days of their vacation at home to unwind from the sometimes chaotic journey home from a trip, that's by no means universal and it's nonsensical to enforce that mentality. The manager complaining about this is wildly off base.

Now, the fact that you leave early and/or arrive late on the days before/after your holiday is maybe not a great look. It rather depends on your workplace culture. It does read to me as not particularly professional but that doesn't mean it's outright unprofessional and it certainly doesn't make it a problem that Needs Addressing. The only real exception is if you're a in a role where coverage is important (reception, call centres, opening a store, ...). If I were managing you I would never talk to you about this unless I was concerned about your hours, had broader issues with your professional behaviour at work, or I saw that the optics were (wrongly) impacting your reputation with others. Then I might advise you to be stricter with your hours but making it A Thing like this would be really rare. It certainly sounds like your direct managers never considered it a problem either so I imagine you're handling this fine. Seeing as how you commented that you actually register these early departures and late arrivals as vacation time, this entire paragraph is basically moot. If it's PTO it's PTO and unless your manager objects to it there's zero problem.

They key thing for the conversation with the complaining manager is to explain the context that he might not have. Hopefully that should get him to see reason and withdraw the complaint. If he digs in his heels on the "you should be at home during your holiday" nonsense then I frankly don't see any way to handle this that doesn't involve going over his head short of accepting the warning and moving on. You could ask them to withdraw the warning since you weren't aware this was an issue and say you'll take the advice to heart, then just ignore it. It's incredibly unlikely they'll ever discover the particulars of your holiday planning again in future after all.

After later updates, it would seem that this manager has decided to take a stand against the flexibility you've traditionally enjoyed here. How to tackle that specific mindset is something I'd leave up to your manager. It's a question on workplace culture and that's not a discussion you likely have a part to play in. But you absolutely can and should argue that if this flexibility is now frowned upon, you should not be officially reprimanded over it. You can tell the complaining manager that you'll make sure not to do this in future but ask him to withdraw the official warning since you weren't aware that it's now frowned upon. (You can then still ignore this entirely as long as you don't actually discuss it at work. As long as you don't bring a suitcase to work and chance upon this manager, how would he find out after all?)

While working as engineer in the "Ufficio Tecnico" of a company, with my working hours were clearly stated to be Monday to Friday, 8:00 to 13:00 and 14:00 to 17:00, I had to listen to complaints voiced by the CEO for:

In my experience this is not a serious violation (the motivations are clearly thin air), rather an alarm bell signaling some maneuver: either against you (preparing the ground for having you gone, by putting some pressure on you in the hope you will make more serious mistakes) or against your manager (if their reports are seen as lousy, their image in the company will be damaged).

First let it be clear that no matter what action you take, the offending manager is already holding a grudge and is already targeting you so you need to defend yourself to hopefully stop his current behavior. The fact that he would even have details as to whether or not you are at your home during your PTO is troubling and borderline stalking.

After that, you need to follow the formal appeal process for this warning. Ask your manager if he is willing to help with this process. If this involves going directly to HR then do so. Make sure that your employee handbook does not support the offending manager's complaint in any way. If your company's appeal process is reasonable and you are fully within your company's regulations you should have no issue winning the appeal.

The problem here IMO is that the offending manager is using weasel-words, in this case "professional". He's not saying it's against the rules (to which you could pull out your contract and ask him to point to the paragraph, or you could ash HR, who sets the rules, for clarification and tell him to shove it when they say you're right), he's not saying it's against company culture (which it isn't, as you say), he's not saying it's illegal in any way, e.g. misreporting your hours (which you could claim PTO and tell him to shove it). He's saying it's unprofessional, and that could mean literally anything, so there's no argument to be made there, because everyone's opinion of "unprofessional" is different. Heck, in the past, I've been called "unprofessional" because my learning style involves asking a lot of questions and I was expected to read manuals and not talk to anyone, which would negatively impact my performance.

However, the opening you have is that this manager has raised a formal complaint against you. I don't know exactly what the details of that are in Italy, but I presume they involve HR in some way. Meaning, they can't actually act on anything without HR being involved, and agreeing there is a violation. Meaning, HR is aware of the situation and believes some rule to have been broken. Meaning, you can actually go to HR and ask for clarification. So you should do that. Contact HR and ask them specifically what company policy you have broken which requires a formal complaint to be made. Clarify that all the time you have taken off was confirmed with your direct manager, approved, and charged with PTO. You will get one of two answers:

They will tell you that you are not allowed to use your PTO for vacation and/or for recuperating after a vacation, and PTO must be taken at home, you must be available for work tasks during PTO, and so on, as this complaining manager has said. In which case, you should probably look into your local labour laws to see if this is actually legal (given that it's Italy and my image of Italy is it's more lax than North America, which is already pretty lax, my guess is it's probably not legal). If it's not legal, you may have cause to fight this formal complaint in court and get a settlement. Once you have determined that this practice is not legal, inform HR of the illegality of this policy; they should reverse the policy and cancel your complaint, and if they don't, then you should have a pretty clean-cut case to sue them. In preparation for this possible outcome, you should document everything; any in-person conversations you have (including the ones you have already had), you should write down the dates, approximate times, and contents of the conversation, and, if it's legal in Italy, you should voice record all other conversations going forward, or take detailed notes; you should also keep a record of all text conversations you have as well to use as evidence. Another option if you don't feel like going the legal route, is to get out of this company ASAP.

They will tell you that the complaining manager is spewing BS, and keep doing what you're doing. You should then inform them that you consider the complaint as harassment (using whatever the legal word for "harassment" is in Italian, make sure to use that word, don't just say "it hurt my feelings" or whatever), and you want it canceled and you want the complaining manager to receive a formal complaint from you. Then consider the case over and done with and continue to do what you're doing.

One of the tenets of workplace culture (and this site), is that HR is not your friend. Baked into this is that HR will never help you, unless you can convince them that your goals and their goals align. Their goal is to protect the company at all costs, from e.g. lawsuits, bad PR, threats, and so on. This is why you have to invoke the legal system when dealing with them.

In the first case, you need to express to them that the company has legal liability due to illegal workplace practices and enforcement of such practices (in particular, use of PTO). Then their goal will be to reverse the offending practices to eliminate the liability; your goal is to reverse those practices so you can do what you want with your PTO. Your goals align.

In the second case, you need to express to them that what you are undergoing, you consider to be workplace harassment, specifically because the complaining manager has launched a formal complaint which could be used against you in promotion or termination decisions. Your career is being threatened over an issue that is not against company policy. It's pretty easy to argue that this constitutes harassment. The company would, of course, be liable in such a lawsuit, as they were notified about the harassment and they failed to do anything about it. Their goal, therefore, is to eliminate the harassment, because they don't want the company to be liable. You want the harassment to stop so you don't have to worry about your future career goals and/or how you use your PTO. Your goals align. And then the icing on the cake is that this manager put the company in a legally precarious position, so it should be relatively easy to argue that he should be formally reprimanded as well.

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