Leave for Parents
Sassy
15 Posts
My question is how many of you have "sick" leave in place for employees to deal with parent situations. Our current "sick" leave policy includes immediate family, but parents are not included in the list. In addition to our "sick" leave, we also have annual leave or vacation time. A 40 hour per week employee will earn 2 hours of "sick" leave and 2 hours of "annual" leave each week. They are allowed by request to ask for leave time in one hour increments or more. I have had a request by employees more than once to review this policy and change it to include parents. I am leaning to include parents, but changes such as this are required to have the concensus of our senior staff and they are split on the issue. One of the issues, is how it is monitored. Those that are against it raised such questions as how can would we monitor if our employee is the one who should take care of the parent and how do we know they are not just volunteering to take their parent somewhere to get some time off. All your thoughts on this issue would be appreciated.
Comments
If they have the time available, my thoughts are to let them use it.
My $0.02 worth,
The Balloonman
I can tell you that I've never worked anywhere that had a sick leave policy where it wasn't abused, so PTO is an easier animal to administer.
When I worked for a financial institution, we converted over and just paid out the sick leave banks. This was done over a three year period as many people had tons of time in their banks. If they terminated before the three year time, they got the money paid out of them.
We just increased the amount of PTO time when we rolled the two into one.
If you have a system in place to insure that, just extend the same rules to the parents. If you don't have those rules, then you are already trusting your work force to that extent. That is not a bad thing.
As others said, this is more and more frequent. The FMLA includes parents in their definition, why would you not want to at least be as progressive as the government (now that sentence just sounds plain wrong!)?
If you get to sticky, you will just get your work force to have Dr's certify the need for parental care and the associated intermittent leave and you will be back in the box anyway.
In WA state, the legislature requires that sick leave may be used for parents, parent in law, grandparents, spouse for serious health condition and emergency. It is difficult to monitor whether they just want to spend time with Grandma or was it an emergency medical condition and employees are offended by questions feeling they have a right to use their sick leave.
Our unions are now asking for sick leave eligibility for grandchildren (not dependent).
I highly recommend not expanding sick leave eligibility but implementing PTO.
However, we recently modified the policy so that if employees request an absence due to an immediate family member's illness, and the absence qualifies for FMLA protection, then the absence is deducted from sick leave. But the employee has to request the FMLA protection and get certification that the absence qualifies for FMLA, before we shift the paid time off deduction from annual to sick leave accruals. We are technically leaving the "immediate family" definition up to the federales - if they change, we'll change.
I too would like to ditch the sick/vacation for PTO. Question: How did you convert from the culture of sick leave to PTO? What did you do with sick leave banks? Did employees complain of "taking"?
We put all the remaining sick hours in a bank called Extended Illness Bank. The EIB was there if an employee had something serious enough to need more than 3 days off. So a few employees got to use it up, and others never touched it.
Some employees were happy with the conversion, and others were not (we had a few with more than 1000 hours of sick pay).
Before the conversion we did not pay out sick leave, but paid out 100% of vacation time when employees terminated. When we converted, we calculated the % an employee earns in sick pay compared to vacation time. When an employee terminated, they received that % of their PTO bank.
The company I now work for has a combined sick/vacation PTO policy. They pay out a % of the bank when employees terminate. That % is based on the % of sick vs. vacation the 1st year of employment.
The old company did not have a maximum accrual amount. This company does. It therefore forces long-standing employees to take time off (an employee who has been here 15 years earns 256 hours per year; max they can have is 490 hours). This sometimes causes problems for the company. We are currently looking at allowing employees to buyout some of their PTO bank once a year. We will probably pay it out at the same rate, or slightly higher, that we pay out terms. The idea is to reward reliable employees, without encouraging them to come in when they are sick. I don't know if we will make the change or not, as the plan still needs a lot of work.
Good luck.