This month, I want to take a moment to discuss PTO, and I want to encourage you to do everything you can (within reason) to approve the PTO requests for your team.
At our church, we provide PTO to all employees. It doesn’t matter if you are full-time or part-time, we provide this benefit to everyone. And, at our church, we provide two separate PTO policies for each employee… one policy for sick/medical time, and one policy for personal time (more on this next month).
When a request comes in, I never care WHY this person is asking off. Honestly, it doesn’t matter to me, and it doesn’t affect my decision to approve/deny their request. When evaluating a request, I only care about three things: - Does this request conflict with strategic events at the church or interfere with this person’s job?
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Is it this person’s turn to serve on a holiday?
- If I approve this request, will it cause this person to exceed their available PTO balance?
Assuming that the answer is “no” to the three questions above, their request is approved 100% of the time. In fact, I am proud to say that in the 7 years that I have served as the Executive Pastor of our church, I have never denied anyone’s PTO request. My team knows that these three things are the criteria for approval, and they have never put me in a position to deny their request.
Also, at most churches, number 3 is the issue that tends to be abused the most (If I approve this request, will it cause this person to exceed their available PTO balance?). However, we use a great HR system (Built For Teams) that prevents this from happening. So, it’s impossible for anyone on our team to request more time than is available.
As I mentioned above, it shouldn’t matter WHY someone is requesting time off. Whether they want to take a trip with their family, or just sit around at home all day and watch movies on Netflix, it doesn’t matter to me. All that I care about are the three things above. And if it passes that test, then I always approve their request and I would encourage you to do the same thing.
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