The temptation to ask employees why they want time off can be overwhelming, but should you ask?
The answer to that is maybe. What if you see your employee making dumb PTO decisions? Should you intervene?
All those how to handle PTO requests that have been floating around your head are now answered here: Should Managers Care About PTO?
I would add that in addition to having buckets for sick and vacation/personal that there could be a way to hoard leave into another bucket. For example, while I was covered under FMLA, when I took my 12 weeks to be off after having my child I used my sick leave and just a smidge of vacation. I still had plenty left because I’d been hoarding. What would be neat is if you could bank x number of hours of sick leave per pay/month/etc into an emergency bucket or something like that. Put some stipulations on it, if needed but then you don’t burn out all your sick leave with a baby.
Companies don’t want to accrue time past the year in which you earn it because it’s a liability for them.
But I worked briefly for the State of California decades ago. They let you accrue time as long as you wished. Then when you retired, you got paid for whatever you’d accrued. I knew people who got paid for a full year of time at retirement. The nice thing was that you might have saved days in year one, but you were paid based on your final salary which usually was much higher.
In my last job at a state university, we could accrue sick leave indefinitely and vacation leave up to 400 hours that would roll over. I hoarded for maternity leave like a squirrel. I know it’s a liability.
My company does encourage us to use our PTO–we only get a certain amount of rollover at the end of the fiscal year. And it is in one bucket–but they also allow us to go in the hole a bit, which can be really helpful if you’ve run up against a problem after taking a holiday. We then have to earn it back before we accrue again.