On Leave

[maradydd]

The other day my coworker and I were comparing the relative merits of our company's vacation and sick leave policies in the US and Belgium, respectively. That part was mostly minutiae, but it also got us talking about the trend in the US, in my lifetime, toward a single pool of "personal time off" rather than discrete sick time and vacation time

Comments

[whswhs]

It was the people who used their sick time as a way of getting extra vacation days who spoiled it for everyone else, maybe? "Well, you know, so many people call in sick after the Superbowl that we might as well just call it vacation time anyway."

[maradydd]

I can understand where that reasoning comes from, but it strikes me as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If you plan to be hung over after the Super Bowl, or to take care of your hung-over spouse after the Super Bowl, and mark it on your out-of-office calendar and so on, that's planned time off; if you wake up the morning after the Super Bowl and realise that your spouse has been puking in the shower all night, that's unplanned time off. It's a semantics problem; calling in "sick" when you have a different kind of emergency doesn't really fit the narrow category of "sick," but it hardly belongs in the "planned absence" category, either. Throwing all the time into one pot is a solution, but the planned/unplanned distinction disappears, and I think that distinction is actually useful.

[whswhs]

Oh, sure, I don't disagree. But I wasn't thinking of people who wake up the next day and find that they, or their cohabitant, are wrecked. I was thinking of people who plan ahead to have the extra day off, but don't want it counted as a vacation day, so they plan to call in sick . . . but don't give advance notice because "I plan to be sick on Superbowl Monday" lacks verisimilitude. At least in urban folklore such behavior is often described; I don't know if anyone has measured its actual frequency.

My point was more that such behavior (if it does occur) has a "tragedy of the commons" effect: It's convenient for the people who do it but it undermines a useful business policy.

[maradydd]

If the actual tragedy is "we're unexpectedly shorthanded on Superbowl Monday," though, I'm not sure pooled PTO does any more to solve the problem. People are still out, they're just taking the day off from their common pool rather than their sick (or emergency) leave pool.

My hope, I think, is that deconflating "sick" and "unplanned" will give people who currently feel obligated (or are required) to take time off that is obviously unplanned, like going home early to pump the flooded basement, out of their vacation time, and would rather be honest about things like "Superbowl Monday off" but feel like they're justified in clawing back a relaxation day in the form of a trumped-up "sick day," less cognitive dissonance in their mental accounting. I agree that people who are determined to get their two weeks in Aruba and Superbowl Monday off are still going to lie, though.

[nibor]

This is one of the things IBM had done right when I first started working there, and hadn't destroyed it by the time I left. You had vacation days. And "personal choice holidays", and sick time. Vacation was specified based on tenure and should be planned in advance. Holidays, you got 12 a year, and some number of them were declared by your site office (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Friday after Thanksgiving, whatnot) and whichever ones weren't used you were free to take whenever, and it was considered acceptable to use them on short notice. Finally, sick time - if you were sick, stay home. There was no recorded sick days. If it became a lot of sick time, you might need a doctor's note or something. I brought nothing in to work when I was hospitalized for my acute onset of diabetes, for example

[barbarienne]

Your last sentence here is exactly the problem. I have a couple of staff members who routinely run up against the 24 earned days cap, and I have to plead with them to take a couple of days off so they won't lose their vacation time.

[stachybotrys]

I actually like the "one big pool of time off" approach for a couple of reasons. First, my current employer gives you your total bank of time off hours every year on your hire date anniversary. The time is use it or lose it. You don't have to wait until you've accrued it through the year, but if you don't use it, you forfeit it if you don't make prior arrangements with HR. The second reason I prefer the generic PTO model is that I previously worked for a company that split PTO and sick time, and if you maxed out, you stopped accruing additional hours of either. I sat at max sick time for several years, and then they went to an everything is PTO model, and I lost over 120 hours of "sick time" in the conversion. Those were hours I had accumulated though years of service to the company, and they just went away through restructuring.

[songblaze]

I really hate the pooled time approach. As someone with multiple disabilities that are unpredictable about how they pop up (or how bad they'll be at any given time), any place that pools time...I can't plan any vacations, ever. Because I won't ever know if I'll actually be able to use it, and odds are I won't.

Which I guess is part of why I'll be self-employed at a time in my life where professionally, I would MUCH rather be part of a firm - gives me people I can check things with, you know?

[barbarienne]

I have never NOT had the two split up, and I'm deeply grateful for it