I found that out the hard way at my last job. I thought I was getting two weeks vacation starting out, which is pretty standard. Nope. That ten days included all my sick days too. So I chose to go to work sick in order to take my vacation days when I wanted. I hope HR and upper management caught all my germs. I no longer work there.
The management where I work (a 3-letter telecom) is so lame that they cannot answer the direct question, “What is the official policy regarding time off for illness? How many sick days do we get?”
I have asked that question of 3 different bosses over the last 12 years and have never gotten a straight answer. Or, if they give me an explanation of some type, they don’t bother to share it with my coworkers. Sure, there is the HR website, but it’s just as bad–when you try to get info there, it says to ask your manager.
4 - 5 weeks is best, which gives you time for both an extended holiday and short holidays, like 3 day weekends.
But in my experience the very best time off is when the whole place shuts down. Sun used to do that between Christmas and New Years, all paid. No stress to check your email and be available for emergency questions. When I worked for Bell Labs we didn’t get paid for this time, but almost everyone took it, and we got enough vacation so it wasn’t a problem.
This is an advantage of the European the whole country shuts down in August system.
I agree with every word of this. Also, until my current job, every job I’ve had lumped sick days in with PTO. That resulted in people “working from home” whenever they got sick. I much prefer having sick days separate. I can plan vacations without having to worry that I’m using up all my PTO, and when I’m sick, I can straight up not work.
I despise PTO and I’m glad that my company still separates sick time from vacation time. But, I’ve worked in place where people within their first two years would show up horribly sick so as to not burn precious PTO.
Until the idiotic crackdown on working remotely at my company, I usually worked from home when I was sick, unless it was a truly awful illness. Now, I’ll happily take some of my numerous sick hours since they want to play hardball.
I think in year one, an employee should get two weeks of vacation plus about a week of sick time. While I do think you should be able to take time off in your first year of employment, I think 2 weeks is reasonable as you’re still a new employee and learning. Second year until year 5, 3 weeks of vacation, and then 4 after 5 years.
And yes, I know this sounds ridiculous by European standards.
The second part is a matter of interpretation.
But the first part was badly worded and badly read combined. It was 13 weeks every 5th year after (I believe) ten years service. I believe there were other stipulations such as 10 weeks (or was it 11?) had to be taken in a block. Most of the guys, Dad included, would actually take some sort of job outside the mill to fill the time and a lot got injured (sometimes seriously) after their “long leave” from being out of shape and a little rusty at their jobs. Standard rule of thumb among the workers was that they didn’t want to be around someone their first couple weeks back; it was that much of a problem. When the union asked for and got that in the contract Dad predicted it would be the final decade or so of the plant and he was close to right – lots of other reasons came into play as well. But what business can survive paying the more experienced and trained workers to take 1/4 of a year off with pay?
I design all of my facilities with 4 weeks of vacation built in. It allows for a quarterly shut down to service equipment and gives everyone a nice break.
I generally like two weeks off to end the year and then a week in July and a week to go hunting so I generally shut down the company for the last two weeks of the year and then give two weeks of vacation plus holidays. I’ve worked for a couple of companies who gave less than 20 days per year and it makes it hard to take enough time off to not burn out so it’s generally been short stints.
I currently work for a company that gives me the best PTO I’ve ever had: 3 weeks and the 4 days off between Christmas and New Years.
On the other hand, I’ve worked retail where I acquired a paltry amount for all the hours I worked which was just brutal. On the other other hand, I worked at a place that had unlimited paid time off, but it was one of those deals where you could take off a day here and there if you wanted to, but it wasn’t exactly encouraged to do so. Then again, there were all kinds of problems with that place.
My opinion? anywhere from 3-5 weeks, but my ultimate “shock the system” belief is unless it’s absolutely needed for your business to be open M-F 9-5 or whatever, you should have only a 4 day week. It’s so insanely helpful to have a weekday off for appointments/errands without having to take a PTO day to do it. Plus we have PLENTY of 4 day weeks throughout the year and, guess what, just as much work gets done as my 5 day week.
As mentioned in this thread, it’s having a set period of time off to use for both sick and holiday, so that when you’re sick you usually come into work so that you still have some time off for your vacation.
Should see the looks on people’s faces when I explain that here in my office.
What they don’t have in the UK that the did in Australia is long service leave. If you were with a company for 10 years you would get an additional 12 weeks or so off, and an additional 6 weeks or so every 5 years after. That’s also super nice.
So what happens in a PTO system if you first use your vacation days and then get so sick you can’t work no matter what? Are you just fired?
Last year I had just returned from my summer vacation when a car hit me and I broke my collarbone. Ended up getting seven weeks of sick leave for that (and the last time I saw a doctor they recommended that I should ask for more but I declined) since I need both of my arms in my job. I sometimes wondered how that would have played out in the US.
I can go in the hole 40 hours and actually carry a negative PTO balance. Then I can go on short term disability.
FMLA ensures 12 unpaid weeks off for a medical situation for yourself or your immediate family. There are key person exceptions and it doesn’t apply to very small companies (I think under 50 employees). My employer (school district) doesn’t provide short-term disability and while I can purchase short-term disability coverage through them, they don’t help pay for any of it, and it is prohibitively expensive. We CAN bank days over the years; you pretty much need to have six weeks saved. This is why in America, pregnant women work until our water breaks and a large part of the reason medical emergencies bankrupt people: it’s not just the bills, it’s the loss of income.
Most professional places (at least the ones I’ve worked) have short-term and long-term disability insurance. Short-term kicks in after you use all your sick/vacation time and covers something like 12 weeks; long-term potentially covers you at a reduced salary (like 60% or something) until you either get better or reach retirement age. The actual numbers vary depending on your employer and the policy.
Of course, that’s professional places. I work in high tech, and benefits here are typically very good. I’m guessing there’s tons of places where if you get sick & can’t work, you’re out of luck.
Another thing that happens is that a lot of it is at your boss’s discretion. If you’re an employee in good standing, they might just look the other way if you miss some work, or decide the paperwork involved around short-term disability isn’t worth it if you’re only going to miss a week or two. In my case, when my Mom spent 3 months dying of cancer and requiring a lot of care, I took some PTO / sick days, but I also took plenty of time off just spur of the moment - “Oh I have to go spend a couple hours this afternoon with my Mom because my Dad needs a break”, that kind of thing. Or I worked from their house, and I know I wasn’t at my full capacity. I was so stressed out and distraught that I wasn’t all there.
Through all that, I did try to record my time off, but I know it wasn’t accurate. My boss just told me to do what I needed to do, and never mentioned it again. But again, I work for a place that is in competition for employees, and as such, treats us pretty well. Not all places are like that.
Ideally, as much as realistically possible. But who knows how much of that is possible.
I knew someone who had close to 40 days of PTO a year. That sounded amazing. When you combine that with regular days off like holidays, you can take a week off every couple months and still have sick days.
PTO means the leave is all in one bucket. If you get, say three weeks of PTO per year and you are out sick for two weeks, you have only one week left for vacation. When leave is in separate buckets, you don’t necessarily get more, but there are often different rules for using and accruing different sorts of leave. For example, when I started at my current job, I accrued vacation time at a rate that gave me 10 days per year and sick leave at a rate that gave me 13 days a year.*( vacation leave increases with more time on the job but sick leave doesn’t) But on one specific day each year, any vacation time I had in excess of 40 days was wiped out. Sick leave can accrue up to 40 weeks but I can only take it for medical reasons ( including medical appointments). I could take a day off here and there without actually being sick , but I couldn’t take a two week vacation using sick leave unless I had a doctor who was willing to lie for me. When I leave I will be paid ( in one way or another) for all the vacation leave I have on the books, but I won’t be paid for the sick leave. There is no way my employer would allow me to accrue up to 40 weeks of PTO, because I would then have to be paid for it when I leave the job.
- There are three or four other types of leave and each of them has different rules, too.
I’m an underling, and I said 3-5 weeks, leaning toward the higher side of that.
Here’s why- most people, assuming enough time off, would take a couple of weeks in spring or summer, then a week or two at Xmas/New Year’s, and if they have kids, probably some more time at Thanksgiving and Spring Break.
And most people also like to take the occasional mental health day or long weekend during the year, so let’s say another work-week worth of those. At least you come out to four weeks (no Thanksgiving or Spring break, 1 week at xmas, 1 week for random days off), and at most, you come out to about 6 weeks, assuming that they’re taking the equivalent of a full week between Thanksgiving and Spring Break.
So I’d say five weeks, and let them adjust accordingly as they see fit.
And the whole “PTO” instead of vacation + sick time is accountant-driven idiocy. What it does is make for sick workplaces because every time someone gets sick enough to consider staying home, they have the choice of taking “PTO” or coming in sick. Since “PTO” is a single bucket for both, people tend to be very jealous of it because they perceive it as vacation time. So most people show up to work sick, unless they literally cannot work. And they infect all their co-workers as well, who may or may not come in, and who infect even more people.
My old office suffered this in the early spring- I may have even been patient zero. Me and another person got the B strain of the flu, and it wasn’t as awful as the flu usually is- it was more like feeling vaguely feverish and coughing a lot for the first 4 days. So I went to work (and so did the other co-worker), because I had upcoming vacations planned, and I didn’t want to jeopardize those taking time off if I could avoid it. Eventually I felt crappy enough to stay home for a couple of days, by which time enough co-workers had been infected that our office was working about half-capacity for the following 3 weeks. But my vacation went off without a hitch several weeks later.
Had they had sick time that wouldn’t encroach on personal vacation time, I’d have happily taken that and stayed home several days earlier just in case.
For the record, I don’t think there’s one definition of “PTO.”
My company, for example, has PTO, which is accrued on every paycheck. We also have a set number of sick days, floating holidays and holidays. Those do not accrue, and it’s a “use them or lose them” situation - if you don’t use all your sick/floating holidays by the end of the year, they go away. PTO, on the other hand, rolls over.
Presenteeism(?) can be mitigated by reasonable work-from-home policies.
In my post above I was using it as a euphemism for vacation time, which is what I thought the OP meant. If we’re talking sick leave as well I’d add at least another two-three weeks on top of that 6 weeks of vacation, plus maybe 12-14 paid holidays.
Oh and all leave should roll over indefinitely.