A growing number of companies have combined vacation and sick time into one bucket called paid time off, or PTO, in which staffers decide whether they’re going to use the days for vacation or for family events.
“You’re saying to staffers, it’s PTO, just take it. If you have a sick kid, need a personal day, you’re really stressed out,” Gretchen Van Vlymen, a vice president of Chicago-based HR consulting firm StratE, tells The Associated Press.
Forty-three percent of companies offered PTO in 2016, up from 28% in 2002, according to a report from World at Work, an association of human resources professionals.
The report says 51% of private companies, which would include small and mid-size businesses, offered PTO last year. The association’s report was based on a survey of its members.
One of the biggest pluses about PTO for small business owners is eliminating the administrative chore of tracking how many sick days versus vacation days their employees have used.
That can be particularly helpful in the growing number of states, counties and cities where employers are required to allow staffers to accrue sick time, usually up to 40 hours a year depending on how many hours they work. With PTO, there’s no need to track hours worked or accrued.
