Video Transcript
So in section d you might store things like entitled vacation days vacation days take in sick days overtime with applicable accrued paid time off any leaves of absence. So let’s just unpack that a little bit. So entitled vacation days don’t be afraid to be generous and I do mean that. I know the employment standard says if you’re provincially regulated that all you need to give is two weeks for the first few years but what if you gave more. I know there’s an organization in town that gives five weeks to start don’t be afraid, just think, does it fit your culture, what’s the kind of environment that you want to create and what time makes sense. Make it clear how many days people are entitled to. Most cases simply having reconciled pay stubs with accounting speak is not the answer so sometimes what employers do is it’s just on the pay stub it’s a reconciliation of hours to give you an idea of how many hours of vacation you have. Employees want to know do I have 10 days or 15 days. How many have I taken? How many do I have left and when can I take mine? Make them really simple for them because otherwise they’re gonna keep asking unless you make it clear. Vacation days taken there’s a liability there if you’re not tracking it well so make sure you have a good tracking system. If you don’t have something online I strongly encourage you to do so there’s lots of online systems that you can just pay up per user rate and it makes it super simple if somebody wants a vacation. They key it in and it goes to their manager, the manager approves it and all of a sudden you’ve got an accurate record. If you’re not keeping good track of leaves especially vacation you could have a big liability on the books for yourself. There’s an organization that we worked with who had an employee that was leaving and they weren’t keeping good track of vacation and he said that he had something like I don’t remember exactly. It was something like 22 weeks of vacation and 180 hours of overtime but they hadn’t really tracked it that well or at all. So they were then stuck with this liability that unless they could prove otherwise they were kind of in trouble. So please track it and track it well. Sick days ensure you have a clear policy. Consider allowing sick time prior to passing probation. I know you want to wait till probation before you allow people to take sick times or have vacation and that’s okay that fits your culture. I’m all for that and consider doing it right away if you hire. Well, an employee who comes in and is sick within the first three months will surely appreciate it if they got an extra day off because they really really needed it because otherwise I might come in sick but again it has to fit your culture. I’m not trying to subscribe to something that doesn’t make sense for you and not all roles do that make sense so I just say just consider it. But if it doesn’t work for you that’s fine. Also thinking about the differences between personal days and sick days if you want to offer some personal days that’s great please keep sick time separate. Sick time is really intended for when someone’s not well and you don’t want them to come to work. You want to give them some personal days as well. That’s great and also makes it very clear in your policies that you know they don’t get paid out. For it it doesn’t carry forward all of that you want to make sure that that’s as clear as it can be. Over time make sure that your policy asks employees to seek permission first and then make sure you track it and track it according to the legislation of government employment. Accrued time off, if people are going to have bank time, make sure there’s a clear policy. Make sure you’ve followed all the right legislations to ensure that you’re doing it. Not all employees want bank times so make sure if you’re doing it you’ve got the consent that you need. Summary track attendance: consider a web-based system if you’re not using one. Now on track leaves or a liability I can’t stress that enough and just to give you a quick example we were working with an organization so it affects productivity and they were manual they had about a hundred and eighty employees and they had a manual process so an employee wanted vacation time they’d have to get a piece of paper they’d fill it out they’d pass it to so-and-so who’d passed it to so-and-so to pass it to so-and-so who recorded and it would go back to the chain. It was costing them about eight thousand dollars a month in lost productivity. We took all that out and put an automated system in place and all of a sudden productivity loss went down from 8,000 to 3,000 so they gained $5,000 in five thousand dollars in increased productivity per month. Just from a time loss system that just from a sick tracking system or a vacation system tracking does that make sense. So I can’t stress enough how important it is to have really good systems and the automated ones I got to say are the best that you can. I think the best and the easiest are the least likely to have errors . Your employees take time off each year as well. I know everybody gets busy but you know they need to take a minimum of two weeks off. But it’s also important I think they take the time off so that they can come back and be refreshed. This has been an initiative of the city of penticton economic development department and I’m Corey from the data performance group.