My office does it. It’s donations in vacation time, though (you can’t donate sick leave). I’ve donated to coworkers I know and like, but generally it’s just a single day. I don’t follow schedules to know who’s taking lots of time off and who’s been banking all their vacation time for whatever, and don’t really care.
Annual leave (holiday/vacation leave) is a fairly standard four weeks a year. It accrues if you don’t use it. My employer allows us to purchase additional annual leave if it is operationally feasible.
*Sick leave *varies a bit. You usually get 10 days or so. Some employers allow it to accrue; other don’t. My employer has a very generous policy regarding sick leave: it is unlimited, subject to obvious requirements like medical certificates.
Australians also enjoy the benefit of* long service leave*, which rewards those who remain with an employer for a significant period. This also varies a bit but generally accrues once 10 years’ service is reached. You then get 3 months’ additional leave.
Thanks. I love learning about the zillion ways we come up with to solve what’s actually common problems, from sick leave to road codes.
The firm my husband works for doesn’t allow accrual of sick leave, a fact which he only discovered after working there for 15 years and having taken only about three sick days in that time. He ran out of sick leave when he was admitted to hospital last year, thought a clerical error had been made and rang HR to clarify which is how he found out all the sick leave he could have used had gone and then, when he was genuinely sick and in need of it, had insufficient to cover his hospitalisation and recuperation.
Guess who takes all his sick leave now?
Are you ever asked to donate your vacation time at work?
I have never heard of such a thing.
I haven’t heard of this either and I suspect it’s an American thing. It sounds goofy.
We get unlimited sick time but need a note if it’s more than three days in a row. We also have short and long term disability coverage. I take a day or two when I need it with no worries, and don’t ever stress about having something catastrophic happen. I will always pull a salary.
I’ve never worked in a place where donation of leave was possible. I have wanted to donate leave on a couple of occasions (close colleague needing time off to care for terminally ill friend, for example), but I was not allowed to.
We currently have a scheme where we can buy additional leave - which is technically the same as taking time off unpaid (this is also possible, but for some reason, they handle them as different transactions) - I asked if I could sell some of mine back instead, but was refused.
I have never been asked or really worked at a place where this would have been plausible due to either excessive/lack of benefits.
But, I agree with you OP, it would irritate me to even be asked or have some sort of pressure put upon me. While it is nice to be altruistic - you have stockpiled these days for your own purposes - and some people feel more secure just doing that.
I’m not sure I agree with you as much on your position on “Mental Health Days” - I do not know what the legal/common requirements are on this, but mental health problems are just as serious if not more so than physical health problems in many cases. People can be just as unable to do their job due to a mental health issue as a physical one. That doesn’t excuse someone with mental health issues from knowing ahead of time what the policies are on sick leave and to put pressure on others to make up the gap. And perhaps you were putting it in quotes to suggest these weren’t actual mental health problems, but someone using it for an excuse that was basically equal to “I don’t feel like working” at the same level everyone else in the office feels.
That being said - I agree you are right - and don’t think you are even remotely a dick for saying so. I am not sure if want to work in an environment where I was pressured to give up what I had sacrificed to save.
“Mental Health Days” are usually accompanied by severe vision problems. As in “I really don’t see my ass coming to work today.”
Haven’t heard of this and am a bit appalled at the notion.
When “the call” goes out, does the company ever just grant the person more sick days (or offer to match donations), or is that sort of altruism only asked of the rank and file?
We can sell back leave. It’s not encouraged, but it is possible.
I was a Federal employee. We were permitted to donate our annual leave, if we wished, to people who were approved for the leave donation program, but not sick leave. I never donated, and I never expected anyone to donate to me. Despite my husband’s multiple spinal surgeries over the last 7 years I worked, I always had enough leave on the books to allow me to tend to him without running out.
Most of the people whose names showed up as approved to receive donated leave were either people I’d never head of or people I barely knew. I suppose in the right circumstances, I might have donated some time, but it never came up.
We were permitted to accumulate all of our sick leave over the course of our career if we wished, and upon retirement, that time was tacked on to our total time of employment and used to calculate our monthly pension amount. Some people never took sick days for that very reason. Vacation days could be amassed up to 240 hours - at that point, you either took time off or lost it, and upon separation whether because of quitting or retirement, you were paid for whatever hours you had banked. So when I retired, I got a check for close to 200 hours of vacation time and I had a few months added to my total time for the unused sick days.
By mental health day, I mean someone just wants a day off, not that they need to tend to their mental illness.
And I don’t even have a problem with that; you need a day off to re-group and you have the time available, go for it. But I cringe whenever I hear “…and he doesn’t even have any paid time off available, so if anyone can donate some of theirs…”
No, that never happens. And ‘the call’ never comes from administration*, it’s always the peers who want to support their friend in need.
*which I also have no issue with
mmm
One of the things that sucks about being self employed is the lack of “sick leave”. When I’m sick, I work. After a recent minor heart attack and stent placement, I went back to work two days before my doctor officially OK’d it.
Of course, when the weather is perfect and I’m feeling burned out, I take some days off. But why waste it when I’m sick?
My workplace does this, but it’s a large workplace so it is pretty impersonal. I don’t mind it at all (except in the sense that I wish we had better ways to manage catastrophic illness). I think it is targeted at people who have reached their accumulation limits or just have so much leave they have nothing better to do with it. I do not feel any pressure to give.
One thing that isn’t accounted for here is maternity leave. My workplace offers zero maternity leave, and an uncomplicated pregnancy can use up all of ones leave on prenatal visits alone. I have no idea how I would swing it if I got pregnant (especially as I am one of those people who gets every damn cold), but I’m not going to be accumulating vast stores of leave for a while.
Fed here.
We get annual leave (currently in the 6 hrs per 2 weeks bracket) and sick leave at 4 hours per 2 weeks. We are allowed to donate annual leave for someone that needs sick leave, but we can’t donate sick leave for sick leave.
That said, I always give a day if I know I can spare it. I don’t run some moral calculation and determine if they’ve “squandered” their sick leave.
YMM obviously V.
I never use sick days or take vacations, so I have donated substantial quantities of leave in the past. I think I’m the overworked moron in the arrangement.
To clarify, there is no “American” way of handling sick time and/or vacation time. It is up to the individual company to determine how it is handled, within any state or federal guidelines.
At my current company we accrue Paid Time Off (PTO) days. Your PTO account is deducted for the number of hours you miss work, whether for sickness or vacation. We can carry over up to 3 weeks per year, the rest is “use it or lose it” (except in California, where the state requires companies to pay workers for unused PTO days). You can “overdraw” your PTO account, up to the amount you are expected to accrue that year. If you leave the company while your account is overdrawn, you owe the company that amount.
In the US there are almost as many ways to handle sick time and vacation time as there are companies.
That seems a bit strong. What is appalling?