Personal Time Off – What’s that?

Tower Fund Services LLC changed their policy on Personal Time Off for their employees effective January 1, 2016.  Having a liberal personal time off policy to begin with, we found that having a restriction on the number of days or half days someone could take off went against the grain on what we believe in when it comes to work/life balance and commitment to family.

We believe that we hire people who are of the same mindset as we are in that we do what it takes to get the job done and maintain a high client service standard.  We dedicate the time and resources to exceed our clients’ expectations.

Our employees are responsible individuals who care about getting their job done as much as the partners of the business.  Placing a formulaic policy that keeps everyone tracking every day they take off; seeing how much time that they can use for a family vacation versus days to take kids to doctor’s appointments, school functions and the like, just didn’t make sense to us or feel right.

From a practical standpoint, a lot of administrative time and effort went into tracking all this and from a historical point of view most people would never take the time they had coming to them because they would put days off till “later” and their plans would change.  I know of so many people who would take random days off to use up their days with no regard to what was going on at work.  They’ve been conditioned to think in a “use it, or lose it” mentality.

Having dedicate people working in a team mindset creates an environment where people want to be there to do their part and work together to complete the work at hand.  So many times staff would ask for a half day for an appointment and only come back later on to wrap something that could have very well waited to the next day.  People who enjoy their job and care about the people they work with don’t see this as a burden.

As business owners, we know what each employee’s role is and what their capacity for workload is, as do the team members who work with them.  Someone who is taking excessive time off will quickly be noticed by us and their team members who will be picking up the slack for them.  From our perspective, taking time off should not be an issue but not getting your job done is.

The change in policy was not a huge surprise to our employees.  To them it seemed as intuitive as we thought it was.  We practice what we preach and this was just a natural progression.