Pawternity Leave and Five Other Unusual Staff Benefits

Earlier this year BrewDog, the Scottish champions of craft beer, announced they are now offering one week’s paid leave to employees that adopt a puppy or rescue dog. So for this week’s blog post, we decided to delve unusual staff benefits.

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Why Half of Your Employees Are Not Using Their Holiday Entitlement

Photo by Hilts uk on Flickr

In the frantic run up to summer, the discussions at THT HQ have naturally drifted towards holiday entitlement, and the big question: how many people actually take their whole entitlement each year? Given that we have the data, we couldn’t resist running the numbers:

Surprisingly, 47% of our customers’ employees finished last year with holiday entitlement remaining!

Around 38% of our customers allow their employees to carry-over some portion of their holiday entitlement, but we still think there’s room for improvement.

The Myth: Employees not taking their full holiday entitlement is good for the company.

It’s easy to get lost in the basic logic that employees not taking holidays equates to higher productivity, but as with most things, it’s more complicated than it seems.

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Update 3.8 – Company Calendar

Welcome to the first update of 2017. We have some big updates planned for this year, but to get you started this update contains a few small but incredibly useful features:

1. Team Calendar Permissions
   A flexible way to open up visibility of teams to other managers.
2. Replace Manager
   Use this button to shift a whole team to a new manager in one go.
3. Company Calendar
   Ever wanted to block out days for everyone in the company? Now you can.
4. Request Cancellation
   Employees can now request to cancel holidays after they’ve been approved.
5. Managers Can’t Delete Past Entries
   Now your managers are only able to delete future entries.

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Update 3.0 – Storing Employee Data

This latest update is the first stage in transforming The Holiday Tracker into a HR management tool – you can now store much more data against each of your employees. Below is a summary of the key features in this update.

1. Employee Data
   The employee data page has been re-imagined, is now spread across multiple pages and contains many more fields.
2. Who Is Off
   Admins can now access a page detailing which employees have planned absence over the next two weeks.
3. Opting Out of Attendance Register Notifications
   You can now set managers and admins to not receive notification emails from the Attendance Register.
4. Admins Weekly Email
   Admins can now receive a weekly e-mail detailing who is off this week and next.
5. Birthdays in the Weekly Email
   You can include a list of which employees’ birthdays are coming up as part of the weekly emails.

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