That might seem like an odd question and one that most of you reading this will possibly answer “yes” to – but do you really? Do you get paid proper holiday pay for the hours you’ve worked or the hours you’ve been contracted to work? Did you get paid for the extra days work this year for the leap year? When you work late past your contracted hours do you paid for these hours?
I don’t know of any company that can answer “yes” to any of these questions and in my earlier career I certainly didn’t work for a single company that could. Everyone talks about how valuable their people are but yet choose not to look after them at the very basic level.
Complete Cleaning Contracts pay holiday based on the number of hours our cleaning staff work and that is logged every month. This is totaled up across the year and the holiday time off is earned based on the number of hours they’ve actually done – not the hours they were contracted to do. So, if someone is a big fan of overtime and covers for a lot of other staff when they’re off then they’ll be rewarded with the extra pay for doing so plus the extra hours of holiday pay too. Our staff qualify for 28 days paid holiday per year and can take this whenever they choose. Often some staff will work in contracts that close over Christmas so, they may have to hold some time back for that but on the whole they’re free to be off when they like and we don’t put constraints on them such as they can’t be off when another member of their team is off. That would just be plain wrong. I hear of people in other companies losing their holidays because their boss won’t let them off because somebody else they work alongside is off too. That type of inflexible behavior has no place in our company and I’m disgusted to hear it’s still in practice in today’s modern world.
Did you get paid for an extra days work this year? Every single member of staff in our business did. After all they did work it so why not pay them for it? If you haven’t been paid for it – then maybe you need to ask your boss why not? I’d love to hear the answer you get.
Lastly, do you work later than your contracted hours? Do you do this often? If so, why hasn’t your boss realised that maybe instead of over working you that they need to get some more people in? In my past careers I’d often work through my lunch and worked an extra hour or more most nights. Over a working month that would add up to an extra week that I’d worked without any extra pay. I did it because it was expected of me but why should anyone have to do this? None of our guys do. They get paid for what they do. I ask them all to leave on time and if they can’t – then they phone in and let one of our management team know why not. We’ll authorise the extra time which they’ll be paid for and we let the client know that there was an issue that required us to go over our time. It may not be something that we’ll bill on that occasion but at least we can have a discussion with the client about unexpected working hours popping up and can set up a procedure to deal with that in the future. The main thing being that people are being properly compensated for their time.
Doing all of the above helps us retain our cleaning staff, which in turn means happier clients and allows us to spend more time growing our cleaning business. It’s all pretty straightforward and honest and we hope that maybe the rest of the country will catch on at some point.
with DWEB DESIGN