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Time-off Round-up – Its time for some time off

vacation time off news roundup

The summer is here and vacation and time off is all the rage. What are your vacation plans? Is it time to finally plan that trip down to Florida? Are you headed out west? Here are a few of the top stories making the news regarding time off and vacations.

 

  1. Project Time off – Apparently there’s another study out. This one, however, is interesting for a number of reasons. The outfit is called Project: Time Off and it has been studying our vacation habits. It turns out Americans’ vacation habits are getting increasingly erratic and some might even say there are some disturbing trends. For instance, in 2000, Americans on average took 20.3 days of vacation per year. In 2015, that number was down to 16.2 days. And what are the reasons we are so scared of taking time off? Well, from being worried that you might lose your job when you get back to having mountains of work waiting for you or just plain ole feeling like a failure if you take too much time off, the reasons why Americans are not taking much needed time off need well, their own vacation. You can read more about the report from Project Time Off from the Crains Cleveland Business.
  2. Brock Turner case: Embattled judge Aaron Persky takes time off. It turns out handing out a controversial ruling on a high profile legal case can take a toll on you. Apparently, the judge in the Aaron Pesky rape case decided to take some time off (a little earlier than previously planned). Judge Aaron Persky did wait for a preliminary hearing he was scheduled to handle today (Wednesday, June 22nd, 2016). For a prima on this case and the subsequent early summer vacation, MercuryNews has a great write-up.
  3. Democrats are wanting to give you more time off to attend your kid’s school events: So some House Democrats want to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) so that employers will be required to give their employees time off to attend school events and extracurricular activities. Of course, given the tendency of Congress to not act, we are curious if this proposed bill has any chance of actually becoming law. Read more about this bill from the WashingtonExaminer.
  4. Sorry guys. Ford workers to get less time off this summer: According to the CourierJournal in Louisville, Ford Motor Company is knocking a week off the traditional two-week summer shutdown at the Louisville Assembly Plant on Fern Valley Road and two other SUV factories to handle increased demand. So business is good, right? Read the rest of the story from the Journal.

With all this flurry of vacation and time off events occurring, how are you tracking your leave requests? For a simpler, less hassle way, try CaptureLeave. It is free to start.

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FMLA Basics: Tracking, Managing Your Employees’ Leave Time Easy

fmla vacation tracking

The Family and Medical Leave Act, passed back in 1993, was an important milestone in then-president Bill Clinton’s first term. The idea was to strike a better balance between the demands of the workplace and family responsibilities.

The law attempts to achieve that balance by allowing up to 12 weeks of unpaid but job-protected leave during any given year for certain purposes. It allows employees to take the time off if they need it in order to recover from a serious illness or injury, or to be the caregiver for a spouse, child, or parent who is recuperating and needs care. The leave time can also be used to care for a newborn child.

There are conditions that must be met in order for workers to qualify for this benefit. You have to have been working for your company for at least a year (twelve months) and must have put in at least 1,250 hours during that time in a location with at least 50 employees within 75 miles of that site. Although the law covers employees in both the private and public sectors, it excludes elected officials and their staff.

This is an important benefit because although it is unpaid leave, you at least have the peace of mind that your job will be there when you are ready to return to work.

That 50-employee threshold can and does vary by state, with some states allowing smaller worksites to be FMLA-eligible, ranging from just 10 employees in Vermont to15 employees in Maine and Maryland to 21 in Minnesota and 25 in Oregon.

Important amendments occurred to the FMLA in 2008 that served to expand the definition of family to make sure that those serving as parents to children are covered regardless of the legal or biological relationship involved. This allows same-sex couples to enjoy the benefits if they are sharing in the parenting of children.

There were also amendments made in 2008 that expanded FMLA coverage to military families by extending its protections to next of kin and adult children. This was important in terms of making sure someone who needs to care for an injured service-member who was deployed overseas could take time off, even if they aren’t in the immediate nuclear family circle of the service-member.

There are critics of the law who contend that it just allows more opportunity for people to be away from work, which means lost productivity as well as the cost of hiring replacement workers to fill the duties of those taking advantage of FMLA leave benefits.

Whether it’s FMLA leave, paid vacation or sick time, the CaptureLeave solution makes tracking and managing your employees’ leave time easy. Sign up for a free trial today to see how CaptureLeave can make your life easier.

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Paid Holidays in 2015: What Will Your Organization Offer?

Paid Holidays

When it comes to planning what your company’s paid holidays will be in 2015, it’s worth taking a look at what other organizations do. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) recently released its study of 2015 Paid Holidays. This year’s study included responses from 492 different HR professionals. Conducted during the month of October, the survey respondents worked in companies of various size, with 33% in organizations with 100-499 employees, 27% at companies with 1-99 employees, 19% in organizations with 2,500-24,999 employees, 17% in organizations with 500-2,499 employees, and 5% in organizations with 25,000 or more employees.

The study reveals that on average companies offer nine paid holidays, including the following seven federal holidays among most organizations (the percentage of responding companies is noted in parentheses):

  1. New Year’s Day, Thursday January 1 (95%).
  2. Memorial Day, Monday May 25 (94%).
  3. Day before Independence Day, Friday July 3 (60%).
  4. Independence Day, Saturday July 4 (76%).
  5. Labor Day, Monday September 7 (95%).
  6. Thanksgiving Day, Thursday November 26 (97%).
  7. Christmas Day, Friday December 25 (97%).

In addition to those “big 7” holidays, other federal holidays recognized by fewer organizations include the following:

  • Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Monday January 19 (37%).
  • Presidents Day, Monday February 16 (35%).
  • Columbus Day, Monday October 12 (16%).
  • Veterans Day, Wednesday November 11 (20%).

Many organizations will also close their doors for a paid holiday on Christmas Eve (47%) on Thursday December 24, while many fewer offer a paid holiday on Good Friday (28%) on Friday April 3. The first day of Passover, which is a major Jewish holiday, will be offered as a paid holiday among only 3% of organizations on Saturday April 4. The other big closure day for paid holidays includes the day after Thanksgiving on Friday November 27, on which 76% of survey respondents will be closed.

Although nine paid holidays is the average, it’s worth noting that 21% of organizations have indicated that they will offer a total of 10 paid holidays in 2015 to full-time employees, with 22% saying they will offer 10 paid holidays to part-time staff.

Another development that is interesting to note is how many organizations are beginning to offer what is called “floating holidays,” meaning the organization offers some amount of paid time off to observe holidays not already on the company schedule. A popular use of this time is to take one’s birthday off as a paid holiday. Of the responding organizations, 36% will offer at least one floating holiday, with 43% offering just one, 29% offering two, 14% offering 3, 9% offering 4 and only 5% offering five or more floating holidays.

Whether it’s recording employee sick time or planning your company’s 2015 paid holiday schedule, the CaptureLeave solution makes time tracking and management easy. Start your free trial account today to reap the benefits.

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Work Absences by the Numbers

absenece numbers chart

When you’re managing leave time and absenteeism among your workers, it’s important to understand many of the different statistical trends that relate to why workers don’t always show up to work the way you wish they would. Take a look at the graph below (source) because it’s a real eye-opener.

The most interesting thing about this graph are those gray-shaded areas that represent peak flu season months, which include December through March. As you can see, people calling out really spikes in those areas, meaning there’s a lot of illness at those times. That’s just one indication of something to keep in mind as you plan for when you’ll most likely need to cover people’s responsibilities more frequently.

How well does this chart reflect the experience of illness-related absences at your organization? It’s possible that you can’t answer that question because you may not even be properly tracking absences. If that’s the case, you’re not alone. The shocking truth is that less than half of organizations measure or manage employee absences effectively (source).

Even more shocking is the effect on your bottom line. One estimate says that employee absences amount to more than 3% of direct payroll costs (source). Another study puts that cost at $3,600 per hourly worker per year and $2,650 per salaried employee per year, noting that a company with 5,000 hourly employees could potentially reduce costs by more than $7.9 million (3.2% of direct payroll) by more effectively managing absenteeism (source).

There are more benefits to taking on more effective management of leave time and absenteeism. Your company could easily experience a nice boost in productivity because once everyone starts to become more aware of what’s happening around absenteeism, there will be an initial and almost natural reduction, which can be taken even further with more careful and aware management. More accurate management will also result in better compliance with leave policies (both government-mandated and company-based) and an overall reduction in disruptions to your organization’s vital operations.

Hopefully, the statistics presented above are motivating you to get a handle on effectively tracking and managing absenteeism at your organization. The good news is that with a solution like CaptureLeave, tracking absenteeism is a cinch because you have the flexibility to quickly get into the web-based system and enter data about employee absences, then run reports that will help you understand both the nature of absenteeism in the unique context of your company which you can then translate into hard numbers that impact the bottom line.

Your company tracks all kinds of employee-related costs very carefully. Isn’t it time to track the cost of absenteeism as well? Even better, isn’t it time to start managing it more effectively? Explore the CaptureLeave website to see what this solution can do for you.

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Paid Leave Benefits: How Does Your Organization Stack Up?

Paid leave Benefits

In September 2014, the US Department of Labor announced a series of grants to 3 different states (Montana, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts) and the District of Columbia to study the feasibility of different ways to offer paid family and medical leave (source). Back in 1993 the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) put into place federal guarantees of job protection for people needing to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave due to illness or family caregiving needs. But how many people can afford that big a chunk of unpaid leave when they are in crisis mode and need it most? That’s why the Obama administration is taking a closer look at ways to help people who need paid time off work to be responsible caregivers or to recuperate from illness and injury.

While businesses are justifiably apprehensive about how such programs would work, how they would be funded, and how they would cover the responsibilities of absent employees, the Obama administration argues that paid leave programs improve people’s health while actually reducing employee turnover and boosting retention, both of which can represent substantial cost savings.

Talent management and HR professionals know that an attractive benefits package that includes paid leave is very attractive to job candidates, making recruitment and retention that much easier. The US Chamber of Commerce notes that such programs do come at a substantial cost, exceeded only by employee health insurance and retirement benefits. A study by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) sheds a good deal of light on how organizations handle both paid and unpaid leave (source).

Paid leave benefits

The traditional approach to paid leave is to separate vacation, sick time and personal days into different plans, but more organizations are beginning to switch to paid time off (PTO) plans that lump it all together and let the employee decide what to use the days for as they want or need. From 2004 through 2008 the number of organizations taking the PTO approach increased from 24% to 42%, showing its rising popularity. Fully 9 out of 10 organizations offer paid vacation while only 8 out of 10 offer paid sick time.

Besides the substantial cost, one of the primary reasons there are still many organizations who don’t offer decent paid leave benefits is the difficulty of administering and managing them. But that’s where the CaptureLeave solution can be of tremendous help. Whether you have one or a half-dozen different types of leave, whether paid or unpaid, your company can track and manage them for all employees easily and effortlessly with the web-based CaptureLeave management system. It’s surprisingly simple and customizable, making well worth your while to start a free trial account to see for yourself how CaptureLeave takes the hassle out of leave management.

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Reducing the Hassle of Managing Vacation Time

Reducing the Hassle of Managing Vacation Time

You depend on your employees showing up and working hard to accomplish your organization’s business priorities. Paid vacation is a great perk, but when not managed well can result in all kinds of headaches and hassles, throwing off the timelines of important projects, creating gaps in productivity that are hard to make up, and generally causing more stress than you need in your work life.

If you’ve ever been in the situation where multiple employees have managed to all request vacations for the same time period, you can have a pretty intense situation on your hands. If they’re all hardworking employees, they deserve their paid time off, but you can’t let all of them go at the same time. These kinds of conflicts are inevitable, and it seems like one or more employees is bound to feel like they’re getting the short end of the deal.

The good news is that there are things you can do to reduce and manage these kinds of headache-inducing situations. It begins with realizing that you simply can’t expect to please everyone all of the time. That said, you want to be seen as fair if not generous in terms of approving vacation requests.

Most organizations have spelled out their policies around the process for requesting vacation time, including how far in advance employees need to make their requests. It’s important that these policies and procedures are made clear to employees during the recruiting, hiring and onboarding phases. Even though someone might get a great deal on last-minute tickets for their dream vacation, they need to understand it might not be possible to grant such last-minute requests if others have already scheduled their vacation times.

Put the responsibility in the employee’s hands in terms of working with their immediate supervisor and colleagues to come up with a plan for how their duties will be covered in their absence. This forces employees to be in touch their peers and can give an early warning to potential conflicts as they discuss mutual schedules.

Something else you can do is offer generous incentives in the form of bonuses or other perks to employees who agree to work during the most popular vacation times of the year, or during periods that are the most critical to your company’s productivity schedule.

Perhaps one of the most important things you can do is empower employees in vacation scheduling by adopting a robust online leave management system like CaptureLeave. After setup, it allows employees to view a calendar and file their vacation request for your approval. The calendar function lets you easily see all company holidays and scheduled vacations by specific departments at a glance, which helps you make the best decisions around vacation requests. Explore this website, view the video demo, or start a free trial account to see what CaptureLeave can do for you!

 

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