Leave-Sharing Plan
Categories: Company Management
Paid time off, or PTO, is one of the great perks of working in corporate America: for every 40 hours we work, we can accrue a certain amount of PTO. We can use it here and there, like taking an hour off every Friday afternoon to beat the rush hour crowd home, or we can save it up and use it all at once on a two-week vacay to the Bahamas.
Most of us will use up every last drop of our PTO every year. After all, we earned it, right? But some organizations give us another PTO option: we can donate it. This is known as a “leave-sharing plan,” and it’s basically a way for employees to give their PTO to another employee.
Why would we do this? Well, let’s say we have a coworker whose wife is seriously ill. She needs all kinds of medical care and attention, and our coworker doesn't have enough PTO to take off all the time he needs to help her out. Through a leave-sharing plan, we can choose to maybe cut our Bahamas trip a week short and donate the other five days of PTO to this coworker, so that he can spend additional time with the wifey without losing any pay.
It’s a nice thing for a company to do, and more and more corporations are beginning to offer this kind of plan.