Reducing Benefits

franfields

We are thinking about eliminating our policy of paying 50% for personal time off days that are unused at the end of the year. Any advice?

Rockie

Most personal days are given for employees to use for personal business instead of having to "dip" into vacation time for small increments of leave needed. However, as with vacation, some employees stockpile it up and then want to have it paid out to them in a lump sum. I have worked for companies that require you to either use it or lose it and that's probably the best policy as far as personal days go. I have also worked for companies that require you to use your vacation allotment in a year's time or lose it. In my present company, we have a very generous paid time off and a lot of employees have "banked" up a considerable amount of time and are asking to be allowed to "cash" it in. This has gotten so prevalent, the company is looking at reducing the amount of accrual that employees are given because of this "stockpiling." Employees are really defeating the purpose of having time off if they never use it.

Don Avery

The only advice that comes to mind is to make sure that you give sufficient warning before the effective date of the change so as to allow employees to use up any days that they are in danger of losing.

dhnyct

Understanding there are always "exceptions", do employees tend to stockpile PTO hours for a 50% payout rather than taking at least some time off?

What do you think of an option for transferring 100% of excess hours to a separate STD account? Also, what happens to those STD hours in the event of termination...50% payout? Forfeit?

franfields

We do allow the employees to move remaining days to a STD bank which can be used for any event that would qualify under FMLA. We also allow them to carryover remaining days but they must be used by March 1 or lost.

Our problem is that with only 110 employees and at a rate of 50%, we still ended up paying out over $40,000 this past year.