Getting Paid Time Off Right

Paid time off (PTO) is a valued employee benefit that we all use to getaway. Who doesn’t look forward to relaxing, turning off the notifications, and not thinking about work!??

When we began Dogwood we offered unlimited PTO. We wanted to be generous in how we treated our employees. Here’s what we found - everyone was scared to take time off. Without having a clear understanding of how much was enough or not enough, most of our staff didn’t take a vacation or felt guilty when they did.

Robert Sweeney, CEO at Facet said “Unlimited vacation is a scam.” He wasn’t alone in his thoughts either and as we learned more, we believed this to be factual. So we made a change to benefit our staff better.??

Beginning in 2022, after 3 years with the old policy, we established a PTO policy for all staff. Each full-time staff member was awarded 80 hours of PTO to begin the year off with and then accrued more PTO at 10 hours a month. In theory, they can take 3 weeks of vacation, sick, or personal time a year.?

We also clarified for the staff when PTO would apply. Any time you are out of the office for more than half a day, or over 3 hours, that’s when you use PTO. This allowed our staff to do things like go to the doctor with their kids, get a haircut, run errands, etc. without having to lose PTO time.?

I’m happy to report that as of May 23, 2022, 328.5 hours have been used by our staff. This averages out to about 3 days off for each of our 14 staff members. The most used was 80 hours by one person, and the least was 4 hours by another staff member.?

Another 508 hours are already scheduled between now and the end of the year for staff to use too. That comes out to just shy of 40 hours each. The most scheduled is 136 hours which just happens to be the same staff member that only had used 4 hours up until now. They’re catching up!

Another change we made was to be more generous in our holiday schedule. In 2022 our staff has 15 scheduled holidays off. Typical holidays with bonus days for Good Friday before Easter and the day after Thanksgiving which we have titled recovery day.?

We don’t get everything right at Dogwood, but we try our best to do right by our staff and our clients. When we see something that needs to be fixed, we fix it. Our hope is to build and retain the best staff of all agencies in the area and one of the first steps we feel is taking care of our staff's mental health by purposefully allowing them paid time off.??