Changing Sick Leave to Personal Time Off Days

Red

We currently allow 5 days per year under our sick leave policy. We are considering changing this to Personal Time Off Days (in addition to their vacation days) so that an employee can schedule these days as he/she needs them and not have to be sick to take them. Has anyone done this? What has your experience with this been? Our vacation time is not generous so this would be a very welcome change for our employees.

System

Our company added that benefit three years ago, and it has worked very well. Our reason for doing that was not because our vacation plan isn't generous, but because we have a sick policy that is only given to salaried/exempt employees, and not to anyone else, so there had been general unhappiness about this issue for years. So we decided to add a personal day benefit, and ours works like this: Personal days are earned based on length of service as of Jan 1st of each year, i.e. 3 mo = 1 day, 6 mo = 2 days and one year = 3 days. They may be used for any reason, and in 8 or 4 hour increments. Unused p. days may be accumulated from year to year, and pay out occurs only at termination of employment.

For the salaried/exempt employees it works as such: On Jan 1st of each year, they are credited with one p. day for every three unused sick days in the prior year. So since they get 10 sick days per year (which cannot carry/payout ever), they can only be credited with three p. days each year.

That, in a nutshell is our policy, and so far everyone is very happy with it.

System

We have PTO, and I like the concept. It's good for employees who have trouble telling the difference between sick, hung over, and lazy. But PTO can be a problem if the total days of annual leave is too low. People don't want to use their leave when they get sick, so they come to work with contagious colds and flu. We have a small epidemic every winter because of this.

James Sokolowski
Senior Editor
M. Lee Smith Publishers

AMW

>We currently allow 5 days per year under our sick leave policy. We are
>considering changing this to Personal Time Off Days (in addition to
>their vacation days) so that an employee can schedule these days as
>he/she needs them and not have to be sick to take them. Has anyone
>done this? What has your experience with this been? Our vacation time
>is not generous so this would be a very welcome change for our
>employees.


Our company has done this so that employees have just Personal Time Off. There is no sick leave for employees. I think it is good to do this, because most companies that offer sick leave, the employees don't use and do not receive any type of compensation for it if they resign. Our company will pay employees for any unused personal time off if they terminate from the company. We have not heard too many complaints from employees about this policy.

AMW