Having an ‘effective’ time off policy is one of the keys to ensuring happy and productive employees. Moreover, a clear and concise time off policy will allow you to better budget for the planned absences of employees and cuts the costs associated with these absences. Talking about time off policies, a recent phenomenon that has grabbed a lot of media attention is unlimited paid time off (PTO). In case you didn’t know that already, unlimited PTO is a time off policy that provides employees with unlimited vacation during a year.
Today, a number of companies are jumping on the unlimited PTO bandwagon. While this time off policy has worked well for some companies, you should consider it for yourself only after you’ve evaluated the needs of your employees and your business. So, how can you create a time off policy to meet the needs of your employees without affecting your company’s productivity? First of all, you need to keep in mind that the paid time off is part of an employee’s compensation package. By keeping this is mind when creating a time off policy, you will be able to create a policy that is acceptable to both you and your employees.
In addition to the above, it is important that the time off policy you create is ‘generous enough’. This means that the paid leave and paid-time off should be generous enough to allow employees to meet their ‘personal’ commitments. Your employees are humans and they need a break once in a while. For this reason, you need to have in place a time off policy that provides your employees with sick leaves, personal/casual leaves, and vacation. Now, there are three different types of time off policies that you can choose from. Following is what each policy entails:
Up front Policies
A time off policy used by many companies today, upfront policies provide employees with a fixed number of ‘paid-days’ off at the start of each work year.
Accrual Policies
This time off policy provides employees with a set amount of ‘time off’ on a monthly/ weekly/ daily basis.
Unlimited Policies
The third and final type of time off policy is the Unlimited Policy. As mentioned earlier, Unlimited Policy is a time off policy that provides employees with unlimited ‘time off’ from work during a year.
Having a clear, concise, and generous time off policy in place is important as this can help you to strengthen your employee value proposition (EVP) and achieve maximum employee impact. By considering the aforementioned information and evaluating the needs of your employees, you can choose/ create a time off policy that is beneficial to both you and your employees.
