Discretionary Time Off for Salaried Employees
It’s a different way of thinking about time off.
Allowing employees to utilize an unlimited amount of days off at their choosing,
well, almost...
Time off is a two-way street. Employees are offered flexibility because we want to invest in their personal lives. But the investment needs to be mutual. In return for flexibility, we ask our employees to invest themselves in our mission, making sure their work gets done and gets done well, so our organization can thrive, our customers are supported, and our colleagues can balance their lives,
The Discretionary Time Off Policy for Salaried Employees requires our management team to rethink how they manage time off. These same principles however should be used for hourly employees who have a fixed number of vacation days.
Create Procedures and Deadlines
Ensuring employees submit their requests by a certain date helps you plan for staff shortages. You can anticipate who will be out of the workplace and plan how much coverage you need.
Setting deadlines also gives you a room to resolve any types of time-off conflicts (e.g., too many employees asking for the same dates off).
If you set a request deadline, let all employees know at the same time. This matters, because you’ll likely get time off requests that can’t all be granted and you’ll need a process for deciding who gets their request and who doesn’t.
Communicate Your Policy
Make your employees aware of the their role in requesting Time Off. Look at all the daily activities and decide which ones are relatively easy to drop or delegate. Sort the tasks into three categories:
Quick Skills (things you can stop doing now with no negative effects)
Off-load Opportunities (tasks that can be delegated with minimal effort)
Long Term and Redesign (work that needs to be restructured or overhauled – key person dependencies).
Employees have ownership in this process too by ensuring that their deliverables are met while they are out of the office.
Manage Time Off Requests
First come first serve Whoever submits their request first is granted the time off. This is why you tell all employees about the deadline at the same time, and with plenty of heads-up. You want to be flexible; some employees may consistently be first all the time and you don’t want the same employees stuck working every holiday just because they didn’t get their request in until the next day.
Seniority This is best used with there are time off requests that, for all other reasons, are equally valid and conflicting.
Avoid what seems to be constant arbitrary managerial discretion. It reeks of favoritism, particularly if there is no specific reason for your decision as to who gets time off and who doesn’t.
Be wary about first-come-first-serve, or placing too heavy a weight on seniority. It is discouraging for new employees to feel as if they will never get optimal time off requests because they haven’t been there long enough.
Please reached out to your HR Business Partner if you have questions or need assistance with managing time off requests.
ADP Workflow for Employees & Managers: Requesting & Approving Time Off
ADP Time Off Workflow for Employees & Managers.pdf