From the employer’s standpoint PTO is advantageous for several reasons:
Some employees see they have available sick leave and call out sick whether they are or not. The switch to combined PTO may be prompted by abuse of sick leave. While most companies require a doctor’s note for multi-day (2-3+) sick absences, they can also require one if there is suspicion of abluse.
The can have a no rollover policy for PTO, whereas in general, sick leave does rollover.
It’s easier (and therefore cheaper) to track one type of leave instead of two. Note that this doesn’t preclude HR/Payroll from notating each as planned time off, unplanned time off and sick time off.
I’ve had a lot of jobs and now work on a temp basis, and get to read a lot of company work policies. I see PTO far more often recently than separate leave.
Right. For the chronically ill, it gives them a larger pool of time off to manage their illnesses without their job being at risk and without legal complications for the company. At the expense of ‘vacation’ time, which some people don’t actually take.
For parents and people who care for family members, it gives them a large pool of time to go to their kid’s soccer game, attend Parent-Teacher conferences, take their kids to the dentist, without provoking reactions from their co-workers or having issues with their individual bosses, who might not like them taking that time off.
Back circa 1990, I worked for a now non-existent company that gave me 21 days of PTO per year. I ‘managed’ mine by calling in for one mental health day per month. At one point, my manager called me in, upset that I was ‘abusing’ the system by doing this. I pointed out that I was the only person that did my job, that I had no backup, no one trained in doing it if I was gone and that I did this to keep sane and then took only 4-day weekends and the like as ‘vacations’. That I picked days when I had no meetings and no deadlines. I told her that if she didn’t want me to do this anymore, then I wouldn’t. But I would schedule a two-week vacation for the coming summer and let her worry about who was going to cover for me. Suddenly she had zero issues with me taking that one mental health day per month.
My employer, a university, actually just did exactly this, however. Hourly staff, who can make up to $87,000/yr, had a different type of paid time off than salaried staff. We were getting up to a total of 24 days as combined PTO (with an option to buy sick time with our PTO at a 1:3 hour rate, which women could use for paid for time off with a new baby, or anyone could use it to care for sick family and/or in lieu of short term disability), while salaried staff had separate sick and personal time which totaled up significantly higher. A couple of years ago there was a big push to unionize and as part of the agreement not pursue unionization the university formally agreed to look into making benefits more equal.
And low and behold, as of July 1, 2019 they actually did it. Now, as long as you’ve worked for 5+ years, we hourly staff now get 15 days sick time and still get 24 day as personal time, just like salaried 5yr+ staff has been getting; all 0-4 year employees get 18 days personal, 15 sick. They also added 4 weeks paid parental leave for both hourly and salaried employees who have or adopt or foster a child, and took over paying for everyone’s previously optional self-paid short term disability (which pays an additional 6 weeks for new birth mothers), and they upped the number of days you can take off via your sick time - if you have it banked - for your parents/your children/your siblings/your housemates from 10 to 25, so we’re all rather pleased with the changes, and feel rather fortunate.
Maybe if the unemployment rate stays low changes like this will become more common, because HR’s explanation about how/why they made the changes mentioned “being a preferred employer” and “competitive benefits” a whole lot. And given they compared our benefits to 2 dozen universities in the northeast and 3 dozen big companies in NH and ME, clearly some other people already have access to robust benefits too. Here’s hoping that it’ll become a wide trend.
Most employees prefer PTO over separate sick and vacation days. One of the nice things about PTO is that you can use it for whatever reason you want. Want to go see the new Spider-Man movie? Go ahead and take some PTO. Heck, you don’t even have to take the whole 8 hours just take 2 to knock off from work early and see it in the afternoon. And you don’t even have to tell your boss why you’re taking PTO. The employee actually has more autonomy with PTO than he would have with standard vacation/sick days.
Assuming 5 hours of PTO is accrued over 26 pay periods that leaves someone with 130 hours of PTO in a year which is a little over 15 days off. And 5 hours is really on the low end of PTO accrual these days. I’d rather have 15 days of PTO than any combination of sick/vacation days.
Just checking in… You’ve given me a lot to think about. Some short answers: Yes, LWOP is Leave Without Pay. Yes, some employers put all leave in one bucket. Not sure there is a written policy being a smaller employer. Again, thanks for the feedback. That’s why I enjoy the SDMB to receive answers from various perspectives to really think things through.
I get that; I was just saying that the way my last employer did it meant that when one of us got sick, there was a distinct choice between coming in sick, and/or taking your vacation time later in the year. Or worse, coming in sick or leave without pay if you’d already used up too much PTO.
Let’s say I got the honest-to-God flu. That usually means staying home for several days until your fever goes away. So if I’m planning to take a week of vacation in the summer, and a week of vacation in the winter around Christmas, that means that I have a fairly stark choice- do I stay home the full four days and sacrifice a couple days of my planned vacation because I’m sick in April, or do I decide to stick with my vacation plans and only take the actual two unallocated PTO days I have left? I HATED that choice- either one screwed someone- my children because we couldn’t go on vacation or visit the grandparents as long as we would have liked, or my co-workers because I was coming back while still contagious. I always have thought one-bucket PTO sucked for that reason, unless employers are relatively generous and give like 3-4 weeks of it. Which they rarely have been in my experience.
Most places I’ve worked were a little more generous than my last employer- we typically got 2+ weeks of actual vacation time, AND around 4-5 days of sick time. Granted, we couldn’t combine them into 3 weeks of PTO to take as vacation if I didn’t get sick, but neither did we ever have to make that choice of shorting my family on vacation time, or infecting my co-workers either.
I get the autonomy angle, but in my experience, people treat PTO as if it was vacation time, not vacation AND sick time, and short the sick aspect.
So much of this depends on the exact business. I know of many companies that are incredibly slow during the month of August. Their customers are wealthy types that leave town in August. They use a lot of European vendors that are closed the entire month of August. Plus it’s hot as hell and people aren’t running around buying stuff. I was hanging out with a friend at one of these places last week,my friend works there. She was bored and wanted company. Everyone was pretty much hanging around doing nothing, no customers came in and the phone didn’t ring once. And it wasn’t even officially August yet.
An employee of one of these companies could probably take 3 weeks unpaid and their employers would be thrilled. As long as they took it in August. I’m sure there are other businesses and industries that experience predictable slowdowns.
I am really trying to understand- but this is the part I don’t get- how is your choice different if instead of getting 12 days PTO , you instead got 10 days vacation and two days sick? If your answer is " I wouldn’t have gotten 10 day vacation and 2 days sick - I would have gotten 10 days vacation and 5 days sick" then your issue is not about the PTO vs separate buckets, it’s about the total amount of time off.
OK, you can’t combine them into 3 weeks vacation - but most places allow you to use vacation time to cover illness. Suppose you were sick and infectious for more than 5 days - don’t you end up with exactly the same choice of infecting your coworkers or shortening your vacation time? I understand you said you never had to make that choice, but my point is the choices you have to make depend on your exact circumstances as much as whether you get PTO or separate buckets - for some circumstances separate buckets are better, for others PTO is better, and which is better can differ for the same person year-to year.
A lot of employers lump sick leave and vacation time into a single “paid time off” category. The argument is that you don’t have to feel guilty about taking a “mental health day” etc. Of course this sucks when they have policies like how much you can accrue, not rolling anything over until the next year, and so on.
Depending on how the OP’s time off accrual works, and his standing with his employer, he might be permitted to simply go negative on time off (as long as the amount of time is reasonable). This is a bit easier from a bookkeeping standpoint, assuming he’s not paid hourly. It does pose the risk that should he be terminated or resign, he’d have to pay it out of his last paycheck.
My employer does have separate vacation / sick leave buckets. Vaca can’t be carried over from year to year; a small amount of the sick leave can (I think we can accrue up to 10-12 days max). Vacation is a once-a-year thing - if I burn through it all in June, I get nothing else until the following January (as opposed to the saner “rolling balance” thing where I’d have accrued more in a month or so).
