I was recently made a salaried employee. Since I’ve been paid hourly my entire career up until now, I’m a little confused about how paid time off works. (Please don’t point and laugh if this is a stupid question. :o )
When I was hourly, it was pretty simple. If I wanted to take a week off, I could ask for a maximum of 40 hours of wages paid to me in that time. Or, I could ask to be paid my wages for what would be my normally scheduled hours.
But if I am salaried, I get my same wage no matter how many hours I work so…what exactly does PTO do? Am I just accumulating some reserve of time that it is permissible for me not to work? Like, I request a day off, eight hours are deducted from my PTO and I receive my same 2-week wage? If I ran out of PTO, would they deny me vacation or deduct from my salary?
My director was also trying to explain the advantage of “personal business.” She said that if I worked at least four hours in a day, I could take a half day off without having to pull from my PTO. I don’t quite understand where the advantage is in this. Since my work is highly flexible and 90% outside of the office, why would I need to reserve a half day off when I could just work around any personal appointment? I guess I can see one advantage in that if an emergency comes up late in the day, I can stop work without having any PTO deducted, but honestly, they are not watching me that closely because they can’t, because as I said, I am not working from an office.