How to manage unused sick leave

liyujiaeva2

My company has a paid sick leave policy- employees can have up to six days of paid sick leave per year. If the sick days are not used, they cannot be carried over to the next year. This means that those who stay healty will lose their unused sick days. We do not want people to feel like they are working hard and "waste" their sick days. So we want to make a policy, such as gift cards to reward those who stay healty, or sick bank to let employees help each other. Any idea how your company manage unused sick leave days? Thanks for sharing!

HallmarkHR

We had the same issues years ago so we changed to Paid Time Off.  We added the sick days to the vacation days, and then employees can use them for any reason. We have scheduled days and non scheduled days.  The non scheduled days are tracked as occurrences and fall under our attendance guidelines.  We really found this change to be a blessing.

bethm

We also switched to PTO and it seems to have cut unplanned absenteeism dramatically.  Additionally, for those who had sick time built up beyond the maximum amount our policy allows in their PTO banks, we created supplemental sick leave.  This can only be used for serious illness and goes according to the FMLA guidlines of such.  Since there is a cap on the amount of PTO an employee can carry over from year to year, anything above that also gets transferred to supplemental sick leave.  We've had 1 woman use it for maternity leave and was thrilled that she was able to take additional time off paid since she had so much in her supplemental leave bank, and yet didn't have to use all of her PTO.