Leave for Parents

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

  • 17 Comments sorted by Votes Date Added
  • Here's my thought. We (Baby Boomers who make up 60% of the workforce) are a generation responsible for all other living generations. We take care of parents, adult children, and sometimes grandchildren; so much so that FMLA itself includes 'loco parentis' and step-children, etc. If your policy allows you to take children to doctors' appointments or use sick time to stay at home and care for a sick child, how is that monitored? Undoubtedly you'll have employees who try to take advantage of the situation. You could modify your policy to require a doctor's note that the parent was seen. How many people do you know would actually leave work, pick up a parent, take him/her to an appointment, drive them back home, then return to work - all to get some time off? Very few.

    If they have the time available, my thoughts are to let them use it.
  • Ditto.

    My $0.02 worth,
    The Balloonman
  • PTO would be a lot simpler to administer.
  • I've worked at places that had both sick leave, vacation leave and then combined PTO. I have even worked where the vacation days were factored into the PTO (I never could figure out the rationale in that).

    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.
  • Haven't heard from you in a long time. It's good to have your input.
  • Look at the objection raised - how do you know the same thing does not happen with your current definition of immediate family?

    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.
  • I agree. Our sick policy has always included parents as immediate family members. Also, though this is specific to WA, we have the WA Family Care Act of 2003 which allows employees to use any/all paid leave to care for sick family members and it specifically includes parents. I think it helps the ee to better balance work/life issues when they don't have to worry over how they are going to deal with situations like these, if they'll be paid, can they afford it if not, etc. And you get a happier ee in the long run, better productivity, yada yada-all that for a simple change in your policy.
  • Instead of expanding sick leave policy; why not convert to a PTO plan. A PTO will allow paid time off for a parent if an employee so chooses and the employer does not have to worry about monitoring. By adding this parental leave ability it might help you sell the PTO conversion to employees.

    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.
  • Our sick leave usually applies to employees' illnesses only. If employees want to take time off to run kids or friends or parents to the doctor or stay home and tend to sniffles, they would usually use annual leave.

    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.
  • Our Illness Leave policy is that the leave can be used for the employee, spouse, child or parent. We only require the doctor's note if the employee is gone for three or more days, which is the same if the employee is out for their own illness.
  • I'm getting to this late...but I'd also like to add that it's not the employers position to determine which child/friend SHOULD be taking a parent to the doctor or helping them meet other needs.


  • That's why we have the FMLA "mirror" policy in place. If the employee wants to use sick leave, then they can have the doctor treating the parent complete the FMLA paperwork and certify that our employee is the person that needs the time off work to tend to the injured/ill parent. If the employee doesn't want to go through the FMLA paperwork, then they're essentially electing to use annual leave, based on employer policy.
  • This is one of the reasons why we ditched sick-leave, vacation, etc. and went to a simple Paid Time Off policy. Employee has "x" amount of days to use for whatever they want. Sick, mental health, doctor's appts, vacation, etc. If Suzie Q needs to take her mom to the doctor, then she uses PTO time. No different than if she was taking herself to the doctor. If it becomes more serious than that, well, that's what FMLA is for. It's been so much easier to manage and employees appreciate the flexibility.
  • HRinGA,

    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"?


  • I am not HRinGA, but I will tell you what we did at a place I worked for years ago. (Long before I was in HR.) We set a limit on sick time (4 weeks if I remember correctly) and rolled that amount over into the PTO bank, as well as 100% of vacation time. Employees who were here every day were therefore rewarded by being given what was essentially to them, extra vacation time.

    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.


  • Employees currently accrue their vacation time, so they kept that time. We converted the "sick" time into PTO and gave everyone an extra 7 days to use in addition to vacation. The only difference being the 7 days were "awarded" and not paid out upon leaving the company. Since you accrued your vacation, that was paid out when you left. (Accounting wanted it set up this way...something about accrueing an extra 7 days would break the bank.) Believe it or not, the hardest part about all this was training my management staff. They kept telling employees they couldn't use PTO if they were sick b/c they had used all of those 7 "awarded" days. I had to repeatedly tell them it didn't matter what bucket of time was used. Any and all could be used for time off. Let me know if you'd like to discuss further. Too much to type. :)

  • What happened to post #15?
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