Bad Manners and Brimstone

Quote from: OnyxBird on March 02, 2020, 10:26:32 pm

Quote from: TootsNYC on March 02, 2020, 03:57:50 pm

Quote from: LadyJaneinMD on March 02, 2020, 06:44:40 am

What she is saying is that

If she goes to the conference, they will pay her way in. Say $10.

If she goes to work instead, she'll get paid for that. That pays $20-$30.  Double or triple what the conference cost.

So, if she goes to the conference, she only gets $10 for the day, whereas if she went to work, she'd get $20-30.

Does that make sense now?

And that $10 will NOT come in cash. It will come in the form of the non-monetary value of the conference she has attended.

Yes, but the OP seems to be saying that the choice to go to conferences is voluntary. If the OP doesn't consider the conference/seminar to be valuable enough to her personally to be worth missing paid work hours and they're truly voluntary, then all she has to do is not go to those conferences/seminars. The employer has presumably done a cost-benefit analysis and decided that the value to the company of employees attending the conference is more than the registration cost but less than the cost of paying employees to go to conferences. The employees who want to go need to do the cost-benefit analysis on their own end: does the conference value to themselves (not the company) exceed the cost of lost work hours or not?

From the employer's perspective, there's a whole spectrum of possible levels of value for a conference:

• If the employer considers it necessary for the OP to do her job, then it's work that should absolutely be paid, but in that case, it would also be mandatory.
• If the employer considers it non-essential but valuable to the company to the point that they really want the OP to go (either to learn or to represent the company), then they would have good incentive and/or obligation to pay for the entire cost (registration and work hours) of having an employee attend as work.
• If the employer thinks the conference is mildly useful/relevant, but not valuable enough to outweigh the costs of paying someone to attend, then it's not cost-effective to "send" someone to the conference (i.e., to have someone attend as work on paid time), but there is value in facilitating attendance for employees who wish to attend on non-work time for their own personal development. (But it's basically like tuition reimbursement for learning pursued in one's own time, not work.)
• If the employer thinks the conference has zero value to them, then there's no value (except possibly employee morale) in offering to pay anything towards it at all, and any employee wanting to go would have to both sacrifice the paid work hours and pay the registration fee.

The OP's employer seems to be falling at #3. As long as they're 1) not trying to dictate how she spends her time at the conference or demand she do work for them there (e.g., representing the company by presenting/recruiting/etc.), 2) they make it clear up front what they're offering to cover (only registration costs versus registration and paid time), and 3) they aren't "unofficially" penalizing people who choose not to attend conferences, then I don't see anything inherently wrong about it.

Personally, I am looking at this as someone who generally dislikes conferences. They're relevant in my line of work, so I go to some conferences because my employer/customers ask for it, and it's paid work time. But if they didn't ask me to go as work, there are few, if any, work-relevant conferences that I would consider attending at my own time and expense. Paid work travel of any type at my company requires advance approval, and approval requires a business justification--they're not miserly about it, but requests to attend conferences without a clear business reason to go (e.g., customer request, presenting papers, direct relevance to a specific project that will fund the travel, etc.) can and do get turned down.

BTW, for those discussing that salaried exempt employees couldn't have their pay docked for missing work to attend a conference, that may be true, but my understanding (from reading "Ask a Manager") is that it would be perfectly legal to require that non-working time to be deducted from whatever vacation time the employer allots, so while the employee wouldn't actually lose pay, if the employer doesn't count it as work time, they would still have to decide if that activity was worth sacrificing that amount of their vacation allotment.

I think you're missing a #5.
5. Company offers a certain amount per employee of conference or seminar registration reimbursement as a employee benefit. I know it's not a popular opinion in this group, but sometimes employers to offer benefits that are primarily benefits to the employee with the focus on employee retention.

I also thought of a personal instance. My company will pay for some online training classes. Many that I take are for "stretch assignments" or technologies that I want to learn about but are not directly related to my current job. It is expected that I'll take these classes on my own time. Will they eventually benefit? Yes. But it is also important to me to personally invest my own time in my career growth.