We're building a high-performance organisation that delivers great software products. We recognise that this requires a lot of hard work and that for our team to perform at their highest possible level, they need to live a well-balanced life and take regular time-out for rest, relaxation and rejuvenation.
We have adopted a flexible holiday policy, where each team member is given the flexibility to take whatever holiday they need. We believe this policy will help us to perform at the highest possible level. We ensure everyone in the team take at least the minimum 23 days though welcome everyone to take more than this.
It is important that you and your colleagues feel that holiday is highly available. That holiday is an easily accessible commodity that enables everyone to get the necessary rest that they need. We intend untracked holiday to prevent burn-out in situations, where individuals feel that they need to "save up" holiday days, or plan elaborate strategies around using your holiday allowance "effectively" later in the year, rather than taking holiday when needed most.
Flexible Holiday is not meant as a way to regularly take large portions of time off work e.g. 1 week every month, or 4 months off straight. Made Tech will support holiday requests that are up to 4 consecutive weeks, if you wish to take longer than this the additional time may be unpaid. Please see our Flexible Working as the alternative to Flexible Holiday in those situations.
We trust you'll use your best judgement when taking holidays. This is the level of notice we expect when you take your holiday:
- For 1 day – you must give at least 2 weeks notice
- For between 2 days - 2 weeks – you must give at least 4 weeks notice, and ideally more
- For greater than 2 weeks – you must give 3 months notice
The ability to book holiday/learning days at shorter notice whilst you are within the chalet is an accepted exception to the above notice periods - in those instances please check in with Scheduling to ensure you are not due to be imminently assigned to an account and let your line manager know.
If you wish to book holiday outside of these guidelines, please make a request to your Head of Capability, Head of Industry, or Head of Business Service who will help you plan for this time off.
Having several team members away at the same time can make life really difficult for everyone else. Try to forward-plan your holiday, so it doesn't have a detrimental affect on your team members or on the company.
We recommend you check with your Delivery Lead whenever you join a new team. Our general guideline on this is that only 1 person from a small team (less than 4) may be away at any one time. For larger teams (5+) please refer to your Delivery or Team Lead to confirm what works best for your team.
We want to ensure teams own their holidays and that includes thinking about the commercial impact of taking them. To that affect we need to make sure you've done the following before booking holiday:
- Ask your team members if it's okay with them
- Ask your clients if it's okay with them
- Ensure your responsibilities are covered whilst you're away
- Ensure the Made Tech person leading your client workstream or your line manager provides their agreement
- Ensure that the holiday is placed into CharlieHR
It is the responsibility of the person agreeing to a holiday booking to ensure it is made in aligment to this policy and that the holiday will not impact the quality of service we're able to provide our clients
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We use the CharlieHR calendar when working out project allocation and the number of days being billed to clients, so it's important that it is always up-to-date and accurate.
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Time off due to illness and/or injury are handled separately. Flexible holiday cannot be used for these types of absences.
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If a team members performance declines significantly due to abuse of this policy, then we reserve the right to review their use of this policy.
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We have 23 holiday days in our employment contracts but in practice we have Flexible Holiday as per this guidance. We'd only revert to the employment contract in the case of abusing our Flexible Holiday system though we've never needed to do this. If you leave Made Tech part way through the year we will also use 23 days to pro-rata your final salary. In some cases that means we'll pay you for accrued and unused holiday and in others it means you'll have to pay days taken over your pro-rated allowance back.
- Made Tech closes from Christmas Eve until the first working day back in January
- You will need to book this time off as holiday in CharlieHR unless you were working