our off-site includes a body fat analysis, have to use six PTO days to take a five-day vacation, and more

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager .
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Our off-site includes a body fat analysis
My company recently merged with another and we’ve been invited to an off-site coming up soon. At a briefing meeting this week, our group was given a preview of the agenda for the off-site, which is a combination of working sessions, outdoor activities, and group meals.
However, the agenda also includes a two-hour slot for an InBody test — which, for those not familiar, is a body composition analysis that provides a detailed breakdown of body weight in terms of muscle, fat, and water. It’s been presented as an “optional,” “fun” activity. Even so, am I off-base to think this is a completely inappropriate thing to have in a work setting? Most worrying, it’s also been mentioned as a “traditional” activity, which now has me wondering about what sort of culture I’ve ended up in.
You are not off-base. This is inappropriate in a work setting.
It’s optional, so skip it. If anyone asks why, say “Oh, it’s not my thing” or “No real interest” or “I’ve always figured that’s between me and my doctor.” If you’re comfortable with it, you also could ask some coworkers about it — “they said this was a traditional thing — what’s up with that?” Who knows, maybe you’ll hear the CEO loves it and no one else participates, or that at least a bunch of other people think it’s weird. I wouldn’t necessarily conclude you’ve ended in a completely messed-up workplace culture; lots of companies have This One Weird Thing We Do. But I can see why you’re alarmed.
2. We have to use six PTO days to take a five-day vacation
Several years ago, I worked for a company with a vacation policy I found truly bonkers. I worked at the corporate headquarters of a large regional chain. Everyone at the corporate office was salaried and exempt and worked a standard 40-hour work week, Monday through Friday. It was incredibly rare to work late (and no one worked on weekends). We got three weeks of PTO a year.
The weird thing was: if you took off a full work week of PTO Monday through Friday, you were required to use six PTO days, not five. The reasoning from management was that technically, we were all supposed to work a 46-hour work week (eight hours Monday through Friday, plus six hours on Saturdays), but they simply never enforced the “requirement” to work on Saturdays. And this policy only applied to taking off Monday through Friday—you could take off five (or more!) consecutive work days (for instance, Wednesday through Friday, then the following Monday and Tuesday) without having to use an extra vacation day for the Saturday you “missed.”
Neither the 46-hour work week nor the weird PTO policy was ever communicated before hiring, and it wasn’t documented in the employee handbook—people would find out about it through the grapevine or when they tried taking a week off.
Naturally, this caused a lot of anger among staff, but nobody would push back because management was very toxic and punitive whenever someone questioned authority (that’s a whole separate letter). People just accepted it or found some workaround to avoid losing an extra vacation day. In one memorable instance, a co-worker took PTO Tuesday through Friday, came to work on the following Monday, then took PTO the next Tuesday through Friday (they actually flew home to work that Monday, then flew back to their destination to finish their vacation!).
I know that in cases like this, the answer to “Is this legal?” is almost always “Yes, but it sucks.” But I’ve always wondered if this at least tiptoed up to the line of something shady (especially since the company was known for sketchy labor practices, like hiring long-term freelancers and treating them like employees). I also cannot fathom the reasoning behind such a policy — there was zero impact on workflow if someone took a Monday through Friday vacation, and we were never asked to actually work on Saturdays.
Can a company really require salaried, exempt employees to take an extra PTO day for a weekend day they are never actually required to work? And why on earth would a company do so?
What?! That’s one of the most bizarre policies I’ve ever heard in my 100 years writing this column, and that bar is quite high. (To be clear, there have been many far more bizarre occurrences . But as a corporate policy, this is up there.)
They claimed they had a 46-hour work week that no one was ever informed of and that wasn’t practiced because it was actually fake? And it was fake — as demonstrated both by the fact that no one ever worked Saturdays or over 40 hours a week, and by the fact that they didn’t tell new hires about it. If you have a policy of working Saturdays in a corporate job, you tell people about it before hiring them. They didn’t, because the policy isn’t real.
As for why a company would do this … I cannot imagine. Maybe a decade ago they really did work Saturdays and no one ever updated the policy once that changed (still pretty indefensible). Maybe there’s a sociopath in HR. Who knows.
But while there might be a state law out there that this would violate (California, is it you?), in most states this would be legal. No law requires your employer to give you vacation time, so companies can generally make up whatever weird rules they want to about it.
P.S. I’d bet money you shouldn’t all have been categorized as exempt though.
3. Should my resignation letter include 700 words on why I’m leaving?
I have decided to leave an organization that I have worked at for almost six years. I have some frank, critical feedback that I would like to submit to the organization’s leaders; it is a small organization and I have worked closely with them in the past. Is the resignation letter an appropriate place to outline the reasons why I am leaving? My current draft is about 700 words.
They have done exit interviews in the past, but not consistently, and I want to document my feedback in writing before leaving. I will not need them as references as I am quitting to work for my own business.
Noooo, don’t do it. First, a resignation letter absolutely is not the appropriate place to offer feedback. A resignation letter should be about two sentences and is used solely to document your decision after the conversation where you resign. Second, if you want to give that kind of feedback, I’d strongly recommend that you do it in a conversation, not in an unsolicited letter — but I’d even more strongly recommend that you reconsider doing it at all. If they were truly open to input, you probably would have had opportunities to give it earlier. Critical feedback shot at people as you’re walking out the door doesn’t generally carry a ton of weight or credibility, and it’s an investment of your emotional energy into a place that you’re trying to sever ties with.
(Also: don’t write off the possibility that you might want them as references at some point. Hopefully your new business will thrive and you’ll never apply for a traditional job again, but business ventures don’t always work out that way.)
Related:
should I tell the truth in my exit interview?
4. Did my teacher ruin my college applications?
When applying to college, I asked my high school history teacher to write a letter of recommendation for me. Our school had a system in place where the teachers would submit letters through an online portal. The student cannot view the letter until after submission, and only then if they request a copy.
Months after submitting my applications I needed to use this letter for scholarships and so I requested a copy. To my shock, I saw that my teacher had, in fact, used my older sister’s name repeatedly throughout the letter, instead of my own. All of the facts listed were the same, we both were 4.0 students, both class president, and both had this teacher for the same AP class, just two years apart!
I got rejected or waitlisted by every school I applied to. It has been almost a decade now and I still wonder. How bad of a mistake was this? Is this enough to reject an applicant on its own? Would it be worse in a professional context, rather than academic?
Nah, they’d almost certainly just assume the teacher sent the wrong letter. I doubt it was a major factor in your applications.
Professionally it might be a little weirder, although there too you’d generally assume the teacher messed up. (Although in most industries, written letters of recommendation for jobs aren’t much of a thing anyway, especially from high school teachers.)
5. Explaining why I’m leaving a job after 15 years
I’m struggling with how to best explain my decision to leave a company after 15 years of employment. The job had run its course and I was not making the money I should have after being there that long. I don’t want to appear negative or money hungry at an upcoming interview.
First, it’s not money-hungry to believe you should be earning more . But you’ve been there 15 years! You don’t even need to mention money; you can simply say, “I’ve been here 15 years and I’m ready to take on something new.” Everyone will get that. It’s one of the easiest answers to give and to understand.
You may also like: my new office has a no-humor policy I saw my coworkers' chat conversation insulting our boss - who is also my father do I need to work with the woman my father had an affair with?