No personal offence intended, but managers who think they have a right to prevent employees from taking unpaid leave, barring some really unusual circumstance, just disgust me.
I understand you're reflecting the norms you see around you, but the norms (with the exception of parts of Europe) are woefully backward.
This is how you get an entire "movement" of people desperate to quit their jobs so that they can achieve their life goals.
If your employees are getting less than 30-35 days of PTO per year, preventing them from taking unpaid leave is just mean. (Perversely, in places where people do get 30 days of PTO, it's often easier to take unpaid leave).
The unpaid leave conversation needs to be reversed. Is there a specific reason to deny a time off request at a given point in time? If not, case closed. If yes, this should have been communicated to the employees in advance, so that they can plan accordingly.
Yep. I might have liked to have had a deeper and more long-lasting career, but I never was happy with the requirement to subsume oneself to the employer and be grateful for a 2 week vacation once per year. Luckily, I made a high enough salary (and other factors) that I could retire early and take some control of my life back.
My first real employer was actually much better at this than most (in the US). By the time I left (about 9 years in), I was taking 26 days off per year, some of those unpaid, because they had an awesome policy where almost any job classification could take the days between Christmas and New Years without pay. This was such a tradition that they had even established an accounting system whereby they still paid you for that week, but they had subtracted that pay out incrementally over the course of the rest of the year, so you weren't short a paycheck at a critical time, which was helpful for some employees that aren't so great at saving on their own. It was pretty awesome. And yet, I still chafed.
After that, I worked for employers where you have unlimited PTO. Which really means most people take almost none, and there are elaborate declarations of how proud they are of you if you actually take it. Which is better than
actually making you feel guilty, but just goes to show the culture. They don't really expect you to take time off and the requirements of the job are such that it is hard to take two weeks and still meet annual goals. I will say one employer, at least, was truly flexible with actually showing up to work and when you do your work, so people often didn't come in to work, even if they weren't taking a day off. It made it a bit hard to work with other members of the team at times, but there was a good culture around scheduling doctor's appointments, going to kids' stuff and just doing what you wanted to do, no explanation necessary, so long as work got done on time.
Unfortunately, the culture toward labor is typically pretty bad in America, at least. And then the culture within the workplace can be slightly better or worse. I hope your husband has a slightly better culture. If so, this plan is possible, but my guess is that even if they say yes, it will breed some resentment/create a bit of a negative reputation for him while he is early in his tenure there.
Poll