I'm probably not going to change how I do things, but just a thought I had in the shower this morning and it's been nagging me on and off all day.

My guys get their PTO all at once at the beginning of the year.

Say one of them gets 100 hours of time off, and cost the company $10/hr.
That PTO on January 1 has a value of $1000.
If they take no time off, and get a raise in June to $11/hr, now that PTO time has a value of $1100. Or, in my company's case, if they take zero time off for the year, that PTO get's paid out at the end of the year as a check, which would be at the higher dollar amount based on their final pay period hourly wage multiplied by their amount of PTO hours remaining.

To my way of thinking, the PTO built up is from the previous year's efforts. So why should a raise in pay, raise the value of last year's efforts?
I'm kinda thinking that the amount of PTO should be allocated based on hours, per hourly wage at start of the year, but be kept track of from that point on as a dollar amount.

No real reason for this post, just an angle that I hadn't thought of before, and I was curious what other's thought.

$10 and $11 per hour? Employees stay for that kind of pay?

Cost. Not paid.

Just easy math, at 10.

But if you've got suggestions. I'm all ears. That'd save me about $100k a year.

I think most of them have 150+ hours of PTO now too. 100 hours was just easy math.

Oh Man, Rich C with his usual helpful response. I would be curious how you come up with an increase of 100K a year? How many employees do you have? Lets just say you have 10 employees (for easy math) and they each receive a $1 raise an hour. If all 10 employees have 150 hours of PTO that would be an addition of 10 x 1 x 150 = $1500 a year. $2 an hour raise across the board would = $3000 a year. You are correct that it is an increase, however not quite to the point you mentioned in your question.

At our company, we allow a carry over of 80 hours per year of PTO hours. If an employee has 100 hrs available and chooses not to use it, they would lose 20 hours at the end of the year and start the next year with 80 hours "in the bank". All PTO is paid out at the pay rate an employee is at when PTO is requested. Back in the day (20-25 years ago) we did pay out for unused PTO like you mentioned above, but we have grown from 5-6 employees to 24 over the years, and it just gets to be too much at that point.

Do you have any sort of restrictions on your current policy? If you want to keep paying out for unused PTO at the end of each year and starting fresh on Jan1st, maybe you could incorporate a cap of hours that the company will buy back from the employee. Offer to pay out in cash for up to 20,40hrs max at the end of each year. This would not only incentivize your employees to take some time off during the year, but would spread out your payments over 12 months vs all at once at he end of the year.

No. If they cost me $10 an hour like rich says versus ~$45/hr, that would save me $100k a year.

Our guidelines are pretty loose. There's only 4 of us, and I usually discuss such things with them before anything changes.

As far as paying out at the end of the year. I started doing that because whether you take the time or not, they earned it, they should get it. I stopped letting it carry because one guy never takes time and it was beginning to be a large debt. It does suck shelling out for it in one lump though.

Thanks Adam, You guys just aren't ever going to get off my back? Never seen such a group of people that hold a grudge like you folks.

Rich, to be clear, there isn't any grudge on my end. My comment is based off your response. Karl posted a question asking for ideas/thoughts on how to handle a particular issue. He gave an example in his post so that we could follow along and understand what he was trying to accomplish. Instead of responding with helpful advice to his question, you chose to focus on his example and respond with a question that doesn't have anything to due with the question at hand.

Business would be so simple without all this nonsense. With more employees is easy to sink your ship with this sort of thing. Im kind of on the side of , you get paid for the time you put in, if your not here you dont get paid. If you want some holiday money, you should save it yourself and if your a valuable employee your job will be here when you get back from Disney Land.

I agree 100%. In Minnesota it's now law that we have to give a certain amount of sick time. But it can be just PTO. I think most people I've talked to, if they didn't call vacation time paid time off, they do now.

I haven't looked to see whether or not that sick time has to roll over or not.