Donating Vacation Time

Cheryl W

My company is considering implementing a program that will allow our team members to donate their vested vacation time (which is accrued based on hours worked) to team members who have no vacation time due to extinuating circumstances. If snyone is currently using such a policy, please share how your program works with me, along with the pros and cons and any pitfalls that may exist?

POPEYE

The only experience I have had is with the Public Sector - teachers.
My wife is a member of the "Sick Leave Bank" and contributes 1-2 days per year.
She would then be able to use X amount of days in Y amount of time up to a max per event and a lifetime max.
The only way I could see such a program working is if you had thousands of EEs to contribute. Even then, who is going to make the determination who gets the time, what happens when it is all gone and someone else desperately needs time? Although your company is to be commended for wanting to create such a program, I personally think there are more headaches than advantages.

Tony Kessler

Cheryl,
Using the "search" option to the left of this column, you can find several previous streams of discussion on this same topic by typing in "vacation donation." Hope this helps. tk

Tony Kessler, director of editorial
M. Lee Smith Publishers LLC
(615) 661-0249 ext. 8068

Nat

My previous employer allowed this. The way our policy worked was that if an employee knew of another employee who was out of PTO and was out of work (for medical reasons only), that employee could donate up to 1 week of PTO per calendar year. Employees could donate to individual employees - ours didn't go into a pool. It worked well and the only problems we had were employees who wanted to keep giving time. Our employees liked to be able to donate this time. I was very surprised at how many actually did it.