Bikini Fridays and beer in the vending machines—some employee requests and suggestions seem to stretch far outside a box of any shape or size, according to a 2009 CareerBuilder survey of some of the most memorable ideas hiring managers have received.
Among the most memorable from an online survey conducted from Aug. 20 through Sept. 9, 2009, among 2,924 full-time, nongovernment U.S. hiring managers:
- Allocate a special smoking area for medical marijuana use.
- Hold the team meeting in Hawaii.
- Add a tanning bed to the break room.
- Install a swimming pool.
- Institute bikini Fridays.
- Add beer to the vending machine.
- Add a reclining chair in the lactation room, so everyone can use it for naps.
- Replace an employee’s desk with a futon so the employee could lie down while working.
- Allow workers to change clothes in their cubicles.
- Apply the Family and Medical Leave Act to cover jail time.
- Allow a worker who is scared of the dark to be required to work only during daylight hours.
- Allow an employee more time off to pursue a side business as a clown.
- Recommend that the HR professional wear nicer shoes.
SHRM Online also heard about some of the most offbeat requests that HR professionals and others have fielded over the years. There was the employee who, a few days before Christmas, wanted the Winter Solstice off to worship the Wiccan holiday, recalled Tina Kashlak, PHR, now president of Resume Writers’ Ink.
“The request was granted so that the employee did not feel a bias toward [his/her] religious belief,” Kashlak told SHRM Online in an e-mail. “The manager,” she added, “received [an] education on maintaining an objective perspective and to not pass judgment.”
In addition, Kashlak recalled the employee who asked whether, instead of the company buying everyone a birthday cake, workers could instead have the money that would have been spent. Nope, but the organization did opt to celebrate all birthdays in a given month with one cake and to use the money saved for other incentives.
Then there was the advertising executive working in the United Kingdom who received “cat-ternity” leave in 2003 to bond with her new kitten.
“My former boss, who is a big animal lover, understood I wanted to get the kitten settled in with me before leaving [the feline] on her own,” Caroline Melville told SHRM Online in an e-mail. However, Melville had run out of annual holiday leave. Her boss, she said, “gave me a week’s cat-ernity leave,” figuring that it was far cheaper and less disruptive than maternity leave.
“Thankfully, everyone covering for me also agreed, and they were rewarded with lots of cute pictures!” Melville wrote.
For Linda Konstan, the request she will be hard-pressed to forget was from an employee seeking protection from “alien rays” emanating from his computer.
Konstan was director of HR, office facilities and communication at the now-defunct Alan R. Liss Inc., which she described as “a highly regarded sci/tech publishing firm in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
The graveyard shift employee asked Konstan “to somehow protect him from the alien rays that were shooting at him from his computer and slowly killing him,” she recalled in an e-mail.
“Uh huh. He was our best and fastest typesetter, so we didn’t want to lose him,” noted Konstan, now CEO of LMK Associates/Sensible Human Resources Consulting. “So I sent the office manager to a medical supply store and we purchased one of those large lead dental protectors and I convinced the employee that by putting that apron over his computer when he was not there would keep all ‘rays’ from coming through to him.
“Yup, he bought that and stayed with us for another few years until the firm was acquired by another publisher. He never quite remembered that his computer was used on other shifts.”
Kathy Gurchiek is associate editor for SHRM.
