Is your team helping you achieve your goals with their hard work and skillful efforts? If so, are you awarding them with some rewards other than PTO or a package? If not, consider a Floating Holiday!
At some stage in my life, I was also not familiar with the idea of a floating holiday. But, trust me, the key to retaining top talent as an employer is providing generous benefits and comprehensive packages.
Perhaps you should consider implementing better policies so that floating holidays don’t affect your working calendar. Since many federal and national holidays are already offered with paid time off, many of you are probably wondering why there is a need for floating holidays.
Well, it’s an approach to retain your top-performing team, who are bringing more productivity and profitability. Ultimately, you can reward them with this type of perk as a business leader.
Some frequently asked questions that can help you boost your productivity metrics include, “Are your employees given a choice of deciding their holidays?” What would happen if your staff continued to work eight hours a day, five days a week, during the calendar year without time off other than weekends? So, folks, each of your employees knew they were skilled enough to grab more wonderful opportunities that offered them high-paying hours and annual leave, so to keep them engaged, you need smarter moves, including floating holidays in their package.
Already got a simple tracker for PTO; ensure floating holidays are not tracked the same way. As competitive markets boosted salaries, amazing floating holiday offers kept you ahead of all competitors. But how? Let’s see in this blog!
What does Floating Holiday stand for?
Employers offering a holiday as compensation or a reward are known as floating holidays. This day may be substituted for some public holiday, but is paid for as one other than the annual leave allowed to the employee. This holiday is at the employee’s discretion and can be taken at any time of the year.
Let’s suppose 25th december is the Christmas Holiday but if your employee doesn’t utilize that, this off-day can be readjusted to the event they want it for. But these should be legally authorized according to the company’s policy.
Benefits of Offering Floating Holiday To The Companies
Floating Holidays have great significance in the business calendar, as this paid day off can be utilized as per culture and religious occasions. Employers can act as a leader by offering the staff the option to switch the holiday, which is designed in company policy.
Employers benefit in return, as this connects them with their employees and gives them a sense of comfort.
Spoiler Alert: “The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not say it is a labor law requirement to offer a floating holidays to employees, so it’s a flexible option for employers.”
Making Holiday Policies
To construct your company’s policies, one of the important sections is about PTO and floating holidays, so make sure you know how flexible these terms and conditions could be for your staff team. As these policies decide, you’re winning trust or losing your strengths. To set up holiday policies, make sure:
- Include list of holidays observed nationally or internationally, such as Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Eid, or Diwali, etc.
- Add medical or sick leaves.
- Many countries offer maternity leaves, so don’t forget this part.
- Emergency leave.
- Enlist all the options, such as bank holidays or half days, to make your laws more firm and precise regarding holidays.
- Companies often allow floating holidays for many other purposes, such as traveling, Mental Health day, birthdays, parent-teacher meetings, and weddings
Protocols To Make Floating Holiday Policy
- Adding a floating holidays term can make your policy more flexible apart from PTO.
- It’s an ideal framework to let your employees know transparently about the company’s policies to ensure clarity, transparency, and fair implementation of policies.
- If you’re authorizing employees with floating holidays, ensure you document how many days can be taken as floating holidays. Or how to take approval for these holidays?
- Mention in your policy the time required to approve floating holidays, regular leaves, PTO, and annual leaves.
- Enlist criteria for each type of leave, such as specific employees, time and hours allowed, number of days in a year, monthly limit, or when to take an approval. This way you can smartly track down your employees, keeping the internal database organized.
Such policies, if implemented in an organized and systematic way, can reduce stress for employees and employers. Gave a broader picture of futuristic goals and an easy leave management system. These laws ensure your working calendar remains unaffected with calculated billable working hours, keeping the management system smoother. By offering 1 to 2 floating holidays, you may achieve
- Flexibility of opening and closing times of year, for instance christmas is the time when retailers can’t go off, but on the other hand, corporate people can.
- You aim to compensate every religion and culture.
- Support your employees with work-life balance.
If you are looking to boost your company’s revenues and improve employee management, then Staffwatcher is an amazing yet simple watcher software. It detects real-time activities of employees and smartly tracks down teams, organizations, and other management data.
Difference Between PTO and Floating Holiday
Getting into differences is super easy, but let me tell you a few similarities: they both are paid holidays, they both are part of companies policies, and they both require a simple approval pathway. Let’s spot the difference now:
- PTO is regular leave or time off, which may be medical leave or emergency time off. While Floating holiday is taken for personal relaxation, celebration, or traveling.
- PTO is given to all the employees. However, Floating holiday is individual-based leave.
- PTO may be adjusted as per need, while FH is a fixed number of days off.
- PTO leaves may be adjusted in the next fiscal year, while Floating holidays expire when the calendar year ends.
- PTO can be repaid under labor law, but floating days do not pay off when leaving the company.
Final Thoughts
Floating Holidays are the most acceptable option for employees who know their worth, so retain them by modifying your holiday policies and laws. This way you can have better work with ethical norms to lift up your company’s progress every year. But this too requires maintenance and monitoring that keep the business operations smooth and efficient. Such as, a monitoring tool is an effective app for account managers for scheduling time off and payroll purposes. Moreover, well-defined holiday policies will help you track the number of working days in a month or year with accuracy and probability of work done. Let your management tools be your personal assistants, such as Staffwatcher!
