Day 2 - How does Santa's Employment Agreement look like?

I think we should take a look at some of the fundamental discussions a growing business faces. Namely employment agreements. Even Santa has one!

One of the main issues when discussing employment is of course the tasks, but also the working time. While making the employment agreement for the Santa himself, we came into the conclusion that Santa does not work under the Finnish working hours Act while travelling around Finland and the rest of the world. This is because the employer cannot control his working time during the travelling. For this reason, Santa is for example not entitled to any overtime compensation during the time spent to travelling, even though his work must be seen as overwhelmingly tiring. Santa does not either have a fixed office since his work is mainly travelling during the Christmas and travelling while shopping for the presents that the elves are not able to make.

For many companies, the major value of the business comes from its experienced personnel. We have, however, in many assignments noticed that the companies do not always act as if they have acknowledged the value of their staff.

This valuable asset, their own staff, is not necessarily treated in a fair way or the company does not protect the know-how of their staff from misuse of competitors. We wouldn’t like to have many Santa Clauses in the world, would we? We will dig into these questions later.

All these issues were taken into consideration in the drafting of the employment agreement as these employment terms do benefit the employer and secure the business. Naturally Santa’s salary and benefits were also agreed upon. Being Santa is hard work and needs to be compensated accordingly. The agreement was happily signed by Santa and his employer to secure the Christmas celebration and delivering of presents to children all over the world.

Our dear customer owns and runs the secret place where Santa lives - yep, apparently Santa has done some outsourcing there and naturally they have a say nowadays. But what is Mrs. Clauses role? We'll get back to that later.

Have a merry Christmas!

Law, Minna