Hoffman Lab Vacation Policy

Transcription

1 Hoffman Lab Vacation Policy Preamble: The first point to be made in writing a lab vacation policy is that you are all hard-working and ambitious. You would not be here, graduate students and postdocs at Harvard, if you were not. So, the original Hoffman lab policy regarding vacation was just to trust each student and postdoc to figure out for themselves how much vacation each needed in order to perform optimally. However, during the first summer of real data acquisition in 2008, it became apparent that while everybody may have made careful individual decisions about optimal performance, the research team as a whole was not performing optimally. In response to this realization, Prof. Hoffman solicited advice from other senior faculty members, and concluded that it would be wise to put into writing a policy that offers some more structure and specific guidelines about work and vacations. Harvard s official policy: Postdoctoral employees are entitled to 20 vacation days per year. These vacation days explicitly do not roll over from one year to the next. There are 11.5 holidays in addition to these 20 days: New Year s Day, Martin Luther King Day, President s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veteran s Day, Thanksgiving and the following Friday, half-day Christmas Eve, Christmas Day. Harvard has no official policy for graduate students. Obviously graduate students are somewhat different they are students, not employees, and they may be entitled to some more freedom, with the goal of a more productive education overall. In particular, students often have to re-negotiate their source of income for three different blocks of the year (Feb-June, July-Aug, Sept-Jan). If a graduate student needs extended time off, or wants to explore some other opportunity during one of these blocks (e.g. a summer fellowship in science policy in Washington, D.C.), the student may discuss with Prof. Hoffman and take unpaid leave from the lab. Otherwise, graduate students should adhere to the same standards that postdoctoral employees are officially held to. Operating modes: There are 3 main operating modes within a laboratory: (1) design & construction (2) data acquisition (3) analysis & writing (papers, theses, proposals) These modes require different kinds of work schedules. In mode (1), team members may be working on designing different parts of the same apparatus, so there is some division of labor. But each team member is very dependent on the others for real-time answers to questions about engineering details, so that all parts may remain compatible, purchases can be made in a timely fashion, etc. There are many invisible decisions that go into designing an apparatus, so it s virtually impossible for one team member to go on vacation and hand over a partially-designed project to another team member for completion. It is therefore advantageous for all members of a team to keep roughly the same hours, and to roughly align their vacations. In this mode, the pace of accomplishment is pretty much proportional to the total number of hours worked. In mode (2), there is a working instrument which consumes resources (e.g. helium) in proportion to the number of hours in operation. There is likely also competition with other research labs who may be performing related experiments. In this mode, it is best to keep the instrument running, acquiring 9/25/ of 5

2 data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is therefore advantageous for team members to stagger their working hours, and stagger their vacations so that the instrument has no down time. If the team members are not smart about allocating their time in this mode, the pace of accomplishment may not be proportional to the total number of hours worked, i.e. hours may be wasted in double-teaming a standard one-person operation just because it happens during normal business hours and everybody feels like they should be in the lab. During this mode of operation, each team member should not have to work more total hours per week than in mode (1), but the hours will be less convenient including late nights, early mornings, and weekends. In mode (3), the work is much more independent. This work can often be done during convenient hours, at home or even while traveling. This mode requires the least coordination of working hours and vacations but ideally all team members who expect authorship should remain in daily contact. How many hours per week? Nobody wants to log a clock or carefully count hours. But 40 hours per week is a minimum, and it is true that most successful graduate students and postdocs (and professors) do work more than 40 hours, most weeks. Do hours roll over from one week to the next? Hours do not roll over from one week to the next, i.e. working 60 hours one week does not justify working only 20 hours the following week. If you work very hard one week, it is because you want to accomplish something that week, not because you want to save up an extra day off for the following week. The Harvard policy explicitly states that vacation days do not roll over from one year to the next; a natural extension of this policy is that hours do not roll over from one week to the next. Do weekend days roll over from one week to the next? Only within reason. For mode (2) teams working on data acquisition, a team member who works through the weekend will of course be entitled to 2 days off some time during the following week. Must holiday vacation days be used on the actual holiday? No, the Hoffman lab has agreed to modify Harvard s official policy to allow 31.5 total vacation days to be taken at any time throughout the year. Do vacation days roll over from one year to the next? For postdocs, the answer is explicitly no, according to Harvard s official policy. This policy is indeed appropriate for postdocs, but there are some circumstances in which a waiver of this strict policy might be reasonable for students. For example a student who must purchase expensive plane tickets to visit family in a foreign country might want to take only 3 weeks of vacation one year in order to earn a 5 week visit to their home country the following year. Such an arrangement should be cleared with Prof. Hoffman in advance! Sick days: If you are too sick to work, stay home and recover. Sick days are not counted against your vacation days. Maternity leave: Harvard s official policy is 8 weeks of paid leave. Details will be discussed on a case-by-case basis. 9/25/ of 5

3 Working remotely: It may make sense from time to time for lab members to work remotely, whether that be from home or further away. This will clearly make sense most often while a team is in mode 3. It may be appropriate during mode 1, if frequent contact with other team members is maintained so that all important engineering decisions can be made in a timely manner. It may make sense in mode 2, if certain engineering, research, design, or writing tasks are necessary for the progress of the project and the timing is convenient with the status of the experiment. For lab members in mode 2, days working remotely need to be scheduled in advance with all other team members and Prof Hoffman. If the remote day(s) result in less convenient or longer hours for other team members, the person who was working remotely will be the first to take less convenient or longer hours when they return, for a length of time equal to the time away, giving team members who were here a break. In order for a day of work put in remotely to count as a day of work, it must meet the following requirements: The lab member must note their location and schedule on the group google calendar. If normal contact information does not apply (for eg, out of cell phone range) then more applicable contact information should be entered there. should be checked at minimum at the beginning and end of the day, but ideally good contact should be maintained throughout the day. 8 hours should be put in at minimum. The work must be necessary and reasonable for the progress of the experiment and not require the postponement of higher priority tasks for which physical presence in the lab is required. Fellowships: Students on fellowships or teaching appointments (who are not paid directly by Prof. Hoffman) might reasonably ask if the same vacation standards apply to them. The purpose of the fellowship is usually to give the student an advantage in joining a competitive research group, or to give them freedom to take on a more risky research project. Some fellowships also offer extra money, presumably as a reward for extra productivity. The spirit of the fellowship therefore seems to be not to allow the student extra vacation, but rather to enable more productive research. So it makes sense that fellowship students be held to the same vacation standards as students paid directly by Prof. Hoffman. A note on Prof. Hoffman s summer vacation: Faculty summer vacation situations are a bit different from the students and postdocs, as the university does not pay faculty summer salary. Professors are salaried for only 9 of the 12 months of the year. If professors wish to be paid for the summer, they must raise their own summer salaries from grants. Suppose Prof. Hoffman is awarded a $100k/year grant which could be used in part to pay her summer salary. However, any money that she takes out of that grant for her summer salary detracts directly from the research in the lab, such as helium or salaries of students and postdocs. So summer salaries are a tricky, guilt-ridden business. During Prof. Hoffman s first 5 summers at Harvard, she paid herself for the 3 full months during only one summer (that was summer 2005). If Prof. Hoffman is unable or unwilling to use research funds to pay her own summer salary, she may choose to take vacation rather than working without pay. This would be akin to a student taking an unpaid leave. 9/25/ of 5

4 Enforcement: Prof. Hoffman does not want to be in the business of keeping a detailed count of every group member s vacation days. It s a pain in the neck, and it implies a lack of trust. It may also encourage everybody to toe the line, when the reality is that there are some goals and situations which will naturally motivate harder work and less vacation during some periods of research. You should all understand that this is a tough job, in which success will probably require you to exceed the minimum expectations. There are plenty of low stress, 40-hour-per-week jobs with incomes exceeding even postdoctoral salaries, and certainly exceeding graduate student stipends. So you must be here, in this low-paying and tough job, because you mostly enjoy the work and you have significant ambitions. You are therefore likely to exceed the minimum expectations naturally, without anybody micro-managing your hours and days. The big picture: The rules now stated, let s step back again to the big picture for graduate school. There are 2 main goals for students employed in the Hoffman lab: (1) To get something done learn new things, new scientific results, publications, theses. (2) To emerge from the experience with enough enjoyment of the accomplishment that it can be put to good use in a related next career step. Having been a graduate student herself, with many graduate student friends, Prof. Hoffman is aware that there s often a slump that hits around the 3 rd, 4 th, or 5 th year of graduate school, especially if a student has been slogging for a long time but the results are not yet coming in. If you do start to feel trapped by this more explicit, written vacation policy, and especially if you feel that you re in danger of missing goal (2), please do not be afraid to talk to Prof. Hoffman, to try to come up with a more individual plan that is better for you. Too much work: Most of this policy has been focused on setting minimum work expectations. But there is also such a thing as too much work: too many hours in the lab, especially coupled with too little sleep, lead directly to careless errors, decreased creativity, decreased ability to think logically and clearly, and decreased scientific productivity. Experiments may occasionally call for a night in the lab. But nobody should ever be in the lab for more than 24 consecutive hours. Everybody should be averaging at least 6 hours of sleep per night. Work weeks > 80hrs should be rare, and should not be consecutive. 9/25/ of 5

5 Summary of the rules: (1) Minimum expectations: at least 40 hours per week of work, at most 31.5 days of vacation per year. Hours and days do not roll over from one week to the next, except in the case of teams who are staggering their work hours to keep an instrument running In general, Prof. Hoffman does not intend to strictly police this policy, and she is generally not going to haggle over a few days. The expectation is that your own ambitions will lead you naturally to adhere to and often exceed these guidelines. (2) With explicit advance permission from Prof. Hoffman, student vacation weeks may roll over from one year to the next. These exceptions are more likely to be granted where foreign travel to visit family is concerned. Students may also request unpaid leave to pursue other short-term opportunities. (3) All vacation days must be cleared with all team members (including Prof. Hoffman) in advance, taking into account the expected operating mode of the experiment during the time of the vacation. Mode (1) teams should roughly align their vacations, while mode (2) team members should stagger their vacations. All planned vacation days should be posted on the Hoffman lab google calendar, as soon as they are known, with contact information if applicable. 9/25/ of 5

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