Holiday Pay: Is It Worth It?

The Victoria Day long weekend is approaching, and as a business owner, you may be debating whether or not you should pay employees holiday pay in order to continue your business operations during this holiday.

To clarify, when I say “holiday pay,” what I mean is the regular holiday pay plus premium pay employers are required to grant employees that agree to work on a public holiday. For guidelines regarding how holiday pay is calculated, you can visit the Ontario Ministry of Labour’s website. In most cases, holiday pay is 2.5 times an employee’s regular salary.

When my clients are making this decision, I suggest they ask themselves this question: Does the cost of paying employees holiday pay outweigh the potential value added to your clients?

Are your clients 24/7/365? Then perhaps your business should be too. If there is a high probability that your clients will need your products/services on a holiday, you may want to consider having employees on hand. Providing availability on public holidays can greatly improve client relationships and ROIs, as it’s an uncommon and possibly lucrative practice.

Since paying employees 2.5 times their regular salary can take a big hit on any small- or medium-sized business’s bottom line, I’d like to share some alternatives to providing holiday pay in order to minimize your costs:

Have Employees Be On Call

If you don’t want to trust the “chance” that clients may need attention, you could have employees be on call rather than officially in the office. However, this won’t be without it’s own price. As a result of Bill 148, beginning on January 1, 2019, on-call employees are entitled to at least 3 hours of pay, even if they aren’t called in to work.

Schedule a Substitute Holiday

In order to avoid the cost of holiday pay or the eventual cost of having an employee on call, you could instead provide employees with substitute holidays. This would save you money, but it may leave you short-staffed on later dates. As a business owner, I know that being only one person short can have a large impact on the productivity of a regular workday.

Is paying employees holiday pay worth it? The truth is, there is no one-size-fits-all formula to decide, even though the government provides a handy calculator to help you figure out the exact cost of an employee’s holiday pay depending on their wage. If you would like some business advice or would like to connect with other business owners in a peer advisory board, contact me today to find out more about TAB!

---