Everyone gets sick. How business owners deal with sick employees varies widely. Whatever your sick leave policy, WorkforceHUB from Payroll Solutions simplifies sick leave administration.
Some business owners don’t provide paid sick leave for hourly employees. Others do for full-time hourly workers but not part-time hourly personnel.
If you knew that staying home meant that you couldn’t pay the water bill or buy groceries—you would come into work anyway. Consider what this type of stress does to a person. (It can’t be good for your health!) What would happen if a nasty flu bug spread through your staff? Many business owners who offer paid sick leave believe that it saves money in the long run.
Regardless of your opinion about paid sick leave, absences due to illness are a fact of life. All employers need to implement a sick leave policy. Here are different types of policies and the pros and cons of each.
Types of Sick Leave Policies
At the beginning of the year, each staff member receives the same number of sick days to be used when needed.
This is fair, but an employee with an extended illness could use all the days up by the end of February.
Sick days are included with vacation days or other paid time off (PTO).
Employees who rarely get sick enjoy more vacation days. Employees who get sick more often may be tempted to come in anyway because they don’t want to shorten their vacation.
Workers accrue paid sick leave based on years worked.
Accruing paid sick days based on years employed can be an incentive to remain with the organization. But new hires get sick just as often. If they come in sick, they could spread it throughout the staff. A widespread illness would hurt productivity a lot more than one employee taking a few days off.
Employees are allowed all the sick leave they need.
Some business owners have dropped all limits on paid sick leave. They let their employees use their own judgment. This has been successful at many large employers like Virgin and Netflix. There’s no reason it couldn’t work at a small company.
Think twice before changing a policy. Especially if you have been allowing employees to “bank” paid sick days. If you discontinue this benefit, you will probably receive some blowback.
With the previous policies, the employer has to decide if unused sick days roll over at the end of the year. If they don’t, you may have half the workforce absent during December because they don’t want to lose their paid days off.
WorkforceHUB sick leave management can help organizations with salaried or hourly personnel. For more details, call 608-837-2590.
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