Paid time off is so important, but lots of things can change the terms involved in taking them.

See how these workers made the most of a new policy.

And how management (hopefully) learned a lesson.

Use your PTO within 2 months or lose it.

I worked for a grocery store that had gone over several different buyouts.

The original company was extremely generous with its paid time off.

Because of how many weeks some employees had, a lot of the older employees have made comfortable careers out of working at a grocery store when you could have up to 3 months paid time off.

But things were about to change.

At least 1 person I knew had this much, but it was very common for people to have 8-10 weeks off a year.

I myself had 6 weeks PTO after 6 years with the company.

Each employee received accrued vacation time, 40 hours paid holiday and 40 hours of vacation a year.

All packaged together as “My Time.”

Sometime in the summer we were informed that our location was being sold because the parent company was merging with another competitor and due to a monopoly in the area, the building had to be sold before the merge.

The entire transition was hectic.

Because the store I worked at was designated the “flagship” of their expansion, we got brand new cooler cases, displays, paint, the works.

On top of taking full inventories of every product in the store and later, ordering heavily from the old companies warehouse to create a stockpile that should last us a few days.

All while training in how the new company operates.

In the midst of all this there was a revolving door of different managers, HR reps, trainers, trainees and such.

Oftentimes with differing or contradictory things to tell us.

By the time we were alerted to what would become of our PTO it was 2 months until the merger was complete.

Any employee staying on with the new company negotiated their PTO and wages during interviews with them, but we were unsure of what the old company was going to do in regards to what we had already accrued with them.

The head of HR sent out a memo that finally ended all guess work.

“Every employee would have 1 week rollover with the new company that can be used during the remainder of the year and old company would pay out 1 week.

Anything unused would be lost.

We recommend all employees adjust their time off requests to reflect this.”

It was a disaster.

Obviously people started to worry.

We were told we had to use it or lose it. So we used it.

People clamored to take time off or just call out sick or leave early.

The day after the announcement I had 4 callouts in my department out of 8 scheduled.

Because our PTO was packaged it was all taken out of the same time bank, so there was no difference between personal days, vacations or calling out sick.

It took the old company almost 2 weeks to change their stance and to renegotiate the terms, upping the rollover to 2 weeks and the pay out to 2 additional weeks.

On top of that employees were all allowed to bump their hours up to 40 and use PTO to make up the difference.

Here is what people are talking about.

I bet they didn’t even look at the data.

Good solution!

Shocking…

I bet! You wouldn’t be the only one.

Do your research before changing a policy.

Because people aren’t about to lose their time off.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.