A New Look At Paid Sick and Family Leave at Emerald City Events
I am the Human Resources Director here at Emerald City Events, your local event planning company in Seattle, WA. Our company currently staffs 10 full-time employees working 40+ hours per week and 20 part-time employees who work on an as needed basis for event prep and day-of execution. Here at Emerald City Events we strive to create the best possible experience for our clients on their special occasions whether that’s small private parties or large-scale weddings. Our purpose is to exceed the expectations of our clientele, with every event specifically catered to each individual with full effort put in by every one of our staff members to make all of these wonderful events possible. The passion and drive that our employees have is stemmed through the sense of community we have generated here in the workplace and continues to motivate our team on a daily basis.
Today, I am here to announce a major innovation to our company that is imitative of the expectations we have for each employee and the culture we have established at Emerald City Events. I am proposing a new and improved paid sick and family leave policy that will be effective immediately for the full-time employees here at Emerald City Events. In this presentation, I will introduce you to the new policy and walk you through the process and terms of the new agreement. First, I would like to start out by taking a look at our company culture to see how this policy will best fit the needs of our organization.

Company Culture:

The list here represents the primary aspects of our company culture here at Emerald City Events that were all given to me as suggestions from our team. As an event services company, each one of these aspects is crucial to the success of our business. If we want everything to continue to run smoothly and to live up to the expectations of our clients and each other, then each of these traits needs to be in place and remain as a focal point for all that we do. I think another important focal point for our business needs to be our general purpose: the customer. As we’ve learned from Mackey’s conscious capitalism, he believes there are “four great purposes” for a business. When looking deeper into this, I would definitely consider Emerald City Events a company focused on “The Good.” This ideal is manifested through the service to others and I believe that is exactly what we try and emulate here for our clients. Our service is our greatest asset and it’s imperative that we do everything we can to keep it that way. With our company culture in mind and our purpose central to our everyday work, I have structured this policy to best fit the needs of our workplace.

The Policy:

This new policy will be strictly available to full-time employees and will be active after 3 months of working for the company. Those of you that have already been here for 3 months, the policy will be effective immediately and you will then have your 2 weeks of paid time off for this calendar year. Instead of allowing employees an allotted number of paid sick days or paid vacation days, I’ve decided to lump them all together into one category of paid time off. Therefore these 2 weeks that are given account for any absences from the office no matter what the circumstance is.
I think this is important in maintaining the culture of our company because we are geared greatly toward responsibility and integrity and I think it’s important that we allot these days not dependent on whether you are sick or not. I would rather you say you would like to take a personal day off to spend time with your family rather than “fake sick” just to get your PTO. The integrity aspect plays a key role in this model and should allow us to remain a close-knit community. Along with that, this will also allow for a greater flexibility among our employees which will allow them to be more motivated and driven when using the time that they do have.
Another point-of-view we can look at this from is looking at our company as a pivotal social institution. With the PTO policy intact, the efficiency of our company will remain stable because of our excellent communication and ability to allocate duties appropriately when we know someone will be gone for an extended period of time. This will be executed through our PTO request form in which you must fill one out at least a week in advance if you know you will be gone for a period of 3 days or longer. This will also allow us to still fulfill the needs of all of our clients while also aiding to the needs of the employees. We are helping benefit society by keeping up with the changing business environment and staying competitive in the industry by the ability to grant these benefits. The goal of this policy is to increase employees overall well-being and to maintain our company culture that we have created here at Emerald City Events.
Violations:

There are only two simple violations to this policy that can occur. The first being, taking an extended period of time off without warning in which case you would not be paid for those days missed. If this violation is repeated on numerous different occasions we have permission to terminate employment but will be dealt with on an individual basis and discussed with your manager or supervisor. The second violation results in taking time off before your 3-month mark has hit, in which you will not be paid for those hours and they will then be deducted from your future PTO.
I think of these violations as a correlation to Handy’s ideal of business being like a game. He believes the foundation of the business is centered on truth and trust and the same foundation has been placed here at Emerald City Events. Just like a game, we have rules to follow and clear penalties in place when you are found breaking these rules. The violation policy is simply the means of the game and it wouldn’t be a very good policy if there weren’t a way of reprimanding for times it is broken. We also want truth and trust to remain a core aspect of our business and therefore violators that continue to abuse the system will be seen unfit for the type of environment we are trying to foster here.
Policy Enforcement:

The policy enforcement is very straight forward especially for a company like ours that already has a strong foundation of trust and responsibility. The major aspect of enforcement will be a portion in the signed contract at the beginning of employment that will state the entire policy. By signing, you are agreeing to those terms and have given us the consent to follow through with any punishments for violations from that point forward. One of the key features I was reminded of here was in Dan Ariely’s talk about “Our buggy moral code.” In this he simply stated that one major correlation he noticed with cheating was the idea of an “honor code.” He said that if people are signing off on something (such as our policy agreement), they are less likely to cheat, or in our case violate the policy, because they are reminded of their morals and will feel less inclined. I used this as a basis for our policy and with the current culture we have established I know with brief reminders on top of the contract--our employees shouldn’t have an issue with abiding by the terms.
Questions from Employees:

As a conclusion to my proposal, I have drafted a few questions from employees that I have previously ran the policy by and am using them now to clarify further. The first question asked was, “If I don’t use all of my PTO each year, can I get paid out for the hours I worked?” The answer to this is no. The hours that you do not use of your PTO each year will roll over until you have reached your cap at 6 weeks. At that point all accumulated hours will no longer be counted and you will not be able to get paid out for any of them. The days off must be taken.
The second question, “What happens if I have a family emergency that I have to tend to out of state and don’t have enough time to put in the request?” As long as your manager is informed of the emergency then we can allow that as a “request” in which case you will not be penalized. We will only allow this “emergency requests notice” once per year. After the first instance, you will no longer receive your PTO for those days missed, just like any other time you fail to inform your manager.
And lastly, the third question, “Why is this policy only available to full-time employees?” This is simply the case because not only can we not afford to offer that much PTO to all of our full-time and part-time employees, our part-time employees are already “essentially” getting many days off during their time here. If they want to receive these benefits they are more than welcome to apply for a full-time position but it just isn’t realistic with the amount of hours they are working. I can hardly think of any companies in our area that allow these types of benefits to part-time employees and unfortunately I believe it’s out of our scope. To conclude I would like to thank you all for your time and consideration to this new found sick and family leave policy. We are excited to start implementing the new policy and believe that with this in place, our employees will come to work full of determination and motivation to allow for the best possible service to our clients here at Emerald City Events.