Flex time vs vacation time

Char · January 2004

I am contemplating changing our current vacation policy to a flex time policy whereby employees who have earned vacation time can use it to cover everyday absences a day at a time rather than using it all as vacation time in one block of time. If you have made this change, what was your experience and what restrictions did you put on the usage? Was it optional? If they had not used it at the time they accrued more "time" did they lose it? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

sonny · January 2004

Hi Char, welcome to the Forum. I am a bit confused by your plans. Flex time, to me, is the Flexing of time within a pay week. .it is not charged off to leave. If I work 9 hours on Monday, I can leave an hour early on Tuesday and not be "penalized." It can be of benefit to the employer in that it potentially saves OT and to the ee in that it allows me to go home early. What block of time do you require to use vacation? I think you will find many, if not most, of us already allow the use of vacation time a day at a time. Hope I have helped, not confused. Perhaps some others will jump in.

Char · January 2004

Thanks for the input and the warm welcome. Perhaps I didn't explain myself -- we currently offer only paid vacations - no sick leave or other paid time off. I want to change this so that the "vacation time accrued" can be used to cover sick days and the like. So, I refer to it as "flex" as the paid time off can be "flexibly" used by the employee. I am wondering if I should make it mandatory - that if you call in sick you must use one of the "flex" days you have available. Or if the individual could still take the day off without pay and save the flex time to use all at once for vacation. Am I making more sense? Thanks!

sonny · January 2004

Thanks for the clarification and I do now understand. I think most refer to this as PTO (no specific designation of sick, vacation or personal) You may not want to call it Flex, just to avoid the confusion. Anyway, we require folks to exhaust all paid leave prior to taking it without pay. If you so define your policy, you can require them to use the time and not save it.

Brad Forrister · January 2004

When I've heard of "flex" being used in this context (and it's usually used like Sonny used it above), it's for combining vacation and sick days into all-purpose paid time off. For instance, many moons ago our company converted from 10 days of sick leave + 10 days of vacation to 15 days of all-purpose leave. Before the change, we had a bunch of employees who were sick exactly 10 days a year and a bunch of employees who were sick approximately 0 days a year. The new system was much more fair, and we had few problems implementing it.

The only big problem I can recall is that it was difficult to get across to employees that we'd like advance notice of the one-day "vacations." On the other hand, we never had advance notice of sick days, so we weren't worse off.

Not sure what you mean by "optional."

"Use it or lose it" leavetime policies have their own list of pros and cons. We had a service vendor that had such a policy, with everyone's leave expiring on 12/31, and they had a real problem with staffing in December.

Brad Forrister
Director of Publishing
M. Lee Smith Publishers

Char · January 2004

Thank you so much for your response. I have tried to clarify my quandry a bit more in a response to my friend in Florida. Your response was very halpful. Thanks, again.

Flex time vs vacation time

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