Coverting vacation/sick time to PTO

JA123

Our current vacation/sick policy gives employees all of their vacation and sick time upfront, we do not accrue. We are looking into changing our vacation and sick time to a Paid Time Off (PTO) system. Does anyone have any recommendations on how to make this conversion? If your company converted to a PTO system, did you come across any problems that we should look out for?

dhnyct

We converted to PTO years ago, and it works really well. We especially like not having to determine what kind of leave to charge when someone is out.

If the total benefit is to stay the same, just convert the total number of hours currently allowed for vacation, sick, etc to the inclusive PTO bank.

Our main issue was to educate the employees that PTO does NOT equal vacation. When someone wants to know "how many hours I have left", tell them "x hours as of today", but subject to anything they may use between now and whenever they want to be off.

We prefer the accrual method, but allowed/taken may work okay for you.

LindaS

I was with a company several years ago that switched from vacation/personal days to PTO days. This company also gave all the days at the beginning of the year. We also combined both the vacation/personal to get the total amount of days an employee had for a given year (the schedule was a January 1 renewal). When we switched we had meetings with the employees to explain what the change was and made sure they understood that we were not giving them extra "vacation" days and that this time needed to be used for ANY time they were off. The supervisors really liked the change because it took them out of the situation wherein they needed to ask the employee why they were missing work and then determine if the reason fell under vacation or personal.

We also added one additional item - all employees were required to "bank" three days which could not be used until after October 15th. So if an employee had 10 days for the year, they could use up to seven prior to October 15th and were allowed the remaining three after that time. If an employee used more than their allowed amount prior to that date, the absence was considered unexcused and dealt with on a disciplinary level. In addition, if an employee did not use all their time, they were paid for up to three days on the first payroll on the following year.

I hope this helps.