If You Give Your Employees PPT, Will You Have To Clear It With The Health Department?
What is PPT? Some new transmittable disease? Will it force you to change the health plan you offer your employees? Or, will it land you in the Employers Hall Of Fame in your area?
And the answer is: You’ll be in the Employers Hall Of Fame, which isn’t quite as good as being in the Baseball Hall of Fame… but it is a close second.
PPT is: Paid Personal Time. You do this by combining an employee’s earned vacation time, their allotted sick days, your scheduled holidays and any other days off you offer, such as an employee’s birthday or a religious holiday. Then, treating your employees as adults, let them schedule all of these days with their supervisor so that no part of your company will be in a shortage of labor. Sounds chaotic, but it really does work. Your employees will be happier, which makes your supervisors happier, which makes your customers happier, which makes you happier. What a winning combination.
Most employees will want to get paid traditionally, meaning they will get paid for holidays, take their vacation time and hold on to their sick days. But some employees will really appreciate the point that they can take a longer vacation and not get paid for their holidays. They may want to travel to a different country spending time with family, and can’t work that into a typical one- or two-week vacation. They may want to take time to care for Aunt Mary, who is in a nursing home, or they want a long stretch of time to finish a home improvement project.
The key here is, if you treat your employees like adults and ask them to manage their time off, they will. And they will treat you and your company the same way. An employee who wants the first day of hunting season off can schedule that as PPT instead of calling in that morning and pretending to be sick.
Your other handbook rules will stay the same. If an employee doesn’t schedule a day off before or after a scheduled holiday, and doesn’t show up, they should not be paid for the holiday. Other than a true sick day, all days away from work should be scheduled well in advance.
Salaried folks will take time in full or maybe half-day increments. Your hourly crew should do the same. I don’t recommend that you allow people to take off a random hour here or there because of the bookkeeping nightmare.
There are other details of a program, including the regulations under the Family Leave Act, disabilities, and parental time off in certain states. If you are interested in learning more, please feel free to give me a phone call at 603-242-3521. There is no charge for this type of consulting for USGlass readers.