changing vacation policy to accrual method

Trish

Our current policy states that vacation and sick time is earned as you work, but to save on confusion, our employees paychecks show the bank amount in full at the first of the year. A dilemma occurs when an employee terminates during the year and has overspent their bank. We would like to make two changes:
1. change the vacation year to anniversary year from calendar year. problem we foresee is calculating cutoffs. is there a basic formula?
2. a group of 5 people who have worked here >10 years had to work an entire year before earning vacation. about 8 years ago, the administrator changed the policy to allow new employees paid time off (vacation) during their first year. it is earned during the year worked. we would like to change over to the accrual method, however, this would mean that employees working here many years would not get a vacation for a year. This is a high-volume, high-stress work place. Would it be better to offer a week off as a bonus for one year to all, just to get everyone on the same track? even with this, we still foresee hard feelings when people already at 3 weeks per year are told they have only one paid week off this year. what would be fair to the handful that originally did have to wait the first year they worked??? Thanks for any suggestions.

dhnyct

If your current policy is for employees to earn time off as they work, it would seem each employee would have a current number of hours available. Therefore, they would not necessarily start at zero on your new system.

Trish

thanks for your reply. the issue is really that those employees who have worked here (3) years or more, will not get their usual (3) weeks vacation this year - because they are really working for next year. . . . how do we compensate for this year without bad feelings?

PMI

My company also provides the full allotment at the beginning of the calendar year rather than making employees accrue it as they go. Our written policy states that at termination they will be paid any vacation time that was actually earned but not used. Conversely, if they use vacation time not actually earned, then we deduct this amount from the final paycheck. We haven't had any problems with this system.

(BJ)

The normal transition is to pull ahead all vacation, and allow persons to use all within a defined time period. Then all people start at the same time accuring, and all will go what ever the needed time span would be.

Palbeck

We recently changed vacation accrual from the calendar year to anniversary dates. As far as a formula for this, on the first of the year, the time given to the employee was their roll-over time (if any) plus the amount that they would have accrued up to their anniversary date. This was the amount of time that they would have available to take between Jan 1st and their anniversary. This placed them right where they needed to be so that on their actual anniversary date, they were given a lump sum of benefit time (based on their individual accrual rate) that could be taken from that anniversary date until their next anniversary a year later. Anyway, this proved to be an effective way for us to handle the transition from calendar year to anniversary date.

Secondly, we allow employees two weeks vacation after a year of service. New employees can actually take up to 40 hours after six months of employment but if they choose this option, they are actually borrowing that time from the 80 hours they would receive on their 1st anniversary. Hope this helps and I haven't managed to confuse you or misunderstand what you are asking.

Joli

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 06-04-01 AT 08:53AM (CST)[/font][p]Accumulate a specified number of vacation on a weekly basis. Currently our vacation & sick leave accumulate this way. When an employee leaves, they are only eligible for the vacation earned through the last week of work.