Status: LIVE

Checking your Vacation and Overtime

We use Productive to track time-off (which includes vacation, sick leave, special leave, care leave). We also use Productive to track out time, which includes also the overtime.

Time-off and overtime are separate concepts.

Time-off

According to your contract, you will be able to book a number of vacation days in Productive. See Holiday Requests

You can check how many vacation days you have available under the time-off tab in your profile:

Open

It’s important to understand the concept of accrual with regard to holidays. Basically, each hour that you work (or are on sick leave, etc), you earn a fraction of that as paid time off for taking a holiday. Over a 12 month period, you will earn say 25 days of holidays. If you work 7.7 hours per day, that means that you can take 192.5 hr of holiday in that year. The nuance here is that if it’s say the 1st of July, then at that point you’ve only earned 96.25hrs of your holidays.

On the other hand, we allocate holiday allowances in advance. We typically allocate you 12 months of holidays on your first day of work, and then allocate you another 12 months before your next company anniversary, and so on.

Why does this matter? It’s so you understand what the number under “available” means. That’s how many holiday days you can request today, even though you may not have fully earned them yet, which happens if today is somewhere halfway in the allocation period. You can check the details of how many holidays you’ve been assigned under the small symbol:

Open

Validity also plays a role. If you joined the company on say 01/01/2018, and today it’s July 2023, and you haven’t taken a single holiday since you started (no one does that BTW, just an example), then you won’t be able to book some of those holiday days that you earned in 2018 because too much time has passed. They expire, after a few years.

Overtime

If you are paid to work 38.5h per week, but you end up working 48.5h, then you worked 10h too much in that week. We say that you accrued 10h of overtime. Simple enough. See Flexitime Policy (Overtime) for more details on the policy around overtime (when you can do it, etc.)

Next week you can work say 28.5h. Now you spent 10h of overtime, and are back to 0.

You may accumulate a few days of overtime, and you can combine that with your holiday allowance to take a vacation. Here’s an example, say you want to take 5 days off to go to the seaside, and you have accrued 15.4h of overtime (you work 7.7h per day, so this is 2 full days):

• You can then request 3 days of Time-Off for Vacation (see above), say for Mon-Wed.

• In addition, you request 2 days of Time-Off for Not Available for Thu-Fri and just don’t work on these days. That lack of work on Thu-Fri (while you are continuing to get paid) is consuming your overtime. We have this step, so that your calendar gets blocked during this period and so that no-one books your time on projects by mistake while you are gone.

If you are going to be not available for less than a day, then you can skip creating a “Not Available” request.

To see how many overtime hours you have accumulated, it’s basically the difference between Available and Worked, and you should look across All time. The exact formula is:

where time_off_for_not_available is the number of hours that you’ve requested under the “Not Available” Time-Off category for that given period. It’s a bit of a Productive quirk that we need to do this, and it’s because we use Not Available just as a signal that you aren’t there on that day (for scheduling purposes), but it’s not actually a holiday entitlement of any kind, so we have to calculate it out again. “Leave of Absence” is similar to Not Available and also has to be calculated out.