Salary & Time Off

If you have any questions regarding or problems with your payslips, eg, vacation days, salary, sick days etc, please get in touch with our salary support directly: support@askoutsourcing.se

Salary

Salary is paid out on the 25th of each month. If the 25th falls on a weekend or a bank holiday, it is paid out on the closest weekday before. Payslips come on Kivra, so you need an account there. If you can’t, then we can work around it.

We have an annual salary review for all permanent employees. The aim is to have it in the beginning of the year.

Vacation

You’ll get a salary during your vacation. By strange Swedish legislation, you even get a slightly higher salary during your vacation. Don’t ask why. You get new vacation days on January 1st of each year. If you want to know how many vacation days you have left, look at your payslip.

There are some different systems of vacation policies in Sweden. We practice what can be called “coinciding employment year and holiday year” (sammanfallande intjänandeår och semesterår). This means that you get the days beforehand, and then we work during the year to deserve them. For normal years different systems produce the same results. It’s only your first (and last) year of employment that can differ. If you want to understand how this affects you, ask the Studio Administrator.

The payslip is stored on Google Drive in a folder that is shared with you. If you can’t find this, ask the Studio Administrator.

If you have 30 vacation days during the year, you can save a maximum of 10 days for the next year (for 25, it’s 5). It is your obligation to take out your vacation during the year. The current year’s vacation days are always used before saved vacation days.

Wait, what does that last sentence mean? An example:

Jonas takes 27 days of vacation in 2019. Beginning of 2020, he has 30 vacation days and 3 saved vacation days.

In February, Jonas takes 5 days of vacation. After that, he has 25 days of vacation and 3 days of saved vacation.

When you apply for your vacation, we would prefer if you try to plan ahead, to make it easier on everyone. If you’re working on a project, check with the person in charge for that if the vacation is ok before applying. You make the request in QBIS, and when approved, you add it to Google Calendar as well. Pro tip: Add it to your own calendar so that everyone else sees you are out of the office, and add it to the out-of-office calendar as well.

If you become sick on your vacation, please let the Studio Administrator know. You have the right to save these vacation days and instead receive sick pay if you’d like. Which we assume you do!

Other time off

Life happens to all of us, and sometimes we’ll be unable to work. Here you’ll find all the necessary information about these unfortunate (and not unfortunate!) events and how the best handle them.

Sickness

If you’re sick – feel better and stay home! We would advise you to eat lots of soup, water and ice cream. Report yourself sick in QBIS as well as the #outofoffice channel in Slack.

It is very important that you stay home when you feel any symptoms of illness, even if you’ve tested negative for COVID-19.

For the first calendar 14 days of illness, Block Zero pays sick pay (80% of your salary).

If you’re sick, get back in the office, and fall ill again within 5 calendar days, it counts as the same illness.

After 8 calendar days of staying home for illness, we will start asking for doctor’s notes and an estimate for when you’re back. It’s not that we don’t trust you, but keep this in mind to make all applications and stuff easier for everyone. It will also be needed for Försäkringskassan later.

Read more about extra sick pay reimbursement under Benefits .

Care of sick child (vård av barn, VAB)

From when your child is 8 months old until they turn 12 you can apply for temporary parental benefit when you stay home from work to take care of a sick child. You can also receive compensation when accompanying your child to certain medical appointments or if you are home with them because the ordinary caregiver is sick. For more information, please visit the Swedish Social Insurance Agency’s (Försäkringskassan) website regarding VAB.

Parental Leave (föräldraledighet)

Until your child reaches the age of 18 months, you are entitled to full parental leave, whether you choose to receive parental benefits from Swedish Social Insurance Agency (Försäkringskassan) or not. If you wish to exercise your right to take parental leave, you must report it to your manager at least two months before the date of commencement or, if not possible, as soon as possible. With regard to the first 10 days of parental benefit, you must report this as soon as possible to us as well as to Swedish Social Insurance Agency (Försäkringskassan). This is a benefit extended to the parent to support the other parent who is carrying their child and the newly born child.

Read more about extra parental leave reimbursement under Benefits.

Leave of Absence (tjänstledighet)

In certain cases, a leave of absence or leave without pay request can be approved. Please refer to the legislation which guarantees your right to LOA, for example, in the case of studies. All other requests are subject to the employer’s discretion. A general rule of thumb: ask far in advance.

Time off for sudden sickness or death in the family

There are some things we cannot change regardless how much we wish, and we might all, at some point, have a close of kin suddenly fall ill or pass away on us. In the Block Zero team, we will support each other in times of need. That need, and support looks different for different people, and all situations can not be written down, but here is the policy on how we deal with the actual work hours:

For the actual day of sudden serious sickness or death of a close family member (parent, child, partner, grandparent or parents in law) the time you need, up to one full day, is treated as paid absence. 5 more days of vacation or leave of absence will be automatically approved, and we will do our best to accommodate you so that you can take the time you need.

The day of the funeral of the same close family is also treated as a paid absence. If you need more days for travel and other arrangements, you need to solve it with vacation days. But we will do what we can to be flexible and make that easy for you.

Leaving Block Zero

If you decide to leave Block Zero, we are very sorry to see you go! We also wish you all the best in your new adventures.

The first thing to think about is that we need a letter of resignation in digital format (email or pdf is fine), sent to your manager. In there, you should state that you wish to terminate your employment and what will be your last day. If nothing else is agreed upon, your last day is X months from when you give notice. X is determined by how long you’ve worked in the company and specified here.

The month after your final day, you will get your final salary. That will contain any remaining debts, such as expenses or remaining vacation days, minus debts the other way, such as taken but not yet earned vacation days.

In very rare cases, you can end up with a minus there, but we will do everything we can to avoid it. The typical case is when you are off (vacation, absence, parental leave) during a large portion of your notice period. Make sure to report that far in advance.

If you have earned vacation days not taken out, you will get them paid out on your final salary. Note that since you get vacation days before hand (read above under “Vacation”), all of your vacation days might not be paid out. After five years of employment, however, all your vacation days will be counted as already earned. The remaining flex hours are not paid out.

On your final day, we will have an exit conversation to collect some feedback and also to hand in keys, laptop, phone, etc.