I’m an American. Using a throwaway account because the info would be pretty identifying on my main.
TLDR; how do you accommodate a lot of PTO for a service that is required all day, every day?
The organization I work for adopted a very generous PTO policy about 2 years ago—all employees get 40 days off per year. The first year after the policy went into place, we carried over 160 hours of PTO, the next year (January 2026) we carried over 120 hrs, and that’s how many hours we will be able to carry over each year in the future.
Though, this seems like it would be great to have that much time off, it’s been really hard on my department and has actually resulted in *more* burnout, not less. Last year was tough, but I want to make sure my whole team is able to use all their PTO with the least amount of stress or guilt for everyone involved. This amount of PTO is basically unheard of in the States, so I’m looking to Europe, where it’s more common…
Here are the factors at play:
I work in the kitchen of an emergency shelter. We serve 3 meals a day, every day of the year.
I know some countries essentially shut down for a month or so each year and that’s when many people use their PTO, but that’s not possible for us. Other departments in my organization are able to shut down for all the regular holidays and bank holidays, but my department still runs, as usual.
Anyone who‘s worked in food service can tell you, there isn’t any less work when there’s less people—for example, I can’t cook dinner twice today and skip cooking it tomorrow. We need a certain amount of employees to operate, and we are always operating. We brought on more employees to cover PTO, but for everyone who we bring on, that’s 40 more days of PTO that need to be covered.
I can’t tell anyone when to take their time off, so, even if we have more employees, it’s hard to coordinate when certain days of the week and certain times of year are more desirable for everyone.
While it‘s uncommon for *anyone* in the States to get this much time off, it’s especially uncommon for people who work in food service. As a result, most people are used to only getting time off when they call in sick, and that’s been a hard habit to break for some on my team, even though I pretty much never decline a PTO request and I’m very understanding even with short term notice.
Aside from covering for our dishwashers (everyone gets 40 days off), it’s hard to find temp workers or on-call workers who can fill in, especially for the cooks.
So, all that to ask, what does your country do to accommodate service workers and emergency workers?