Business Consulting
Most of you know me professionally as a real estate appraiser. In addition to appraising real estate, I also offer business bookkeeping, payroll, and consulting services. Over the years I have kept books and consulted for a myriad of businesses and business types ranging from nonprofit churches and civic organizations to for profit retail stores and aquaculture farms…and everything in between.
As you can imagine, I have witnessed all types of challenges and successes, even some of my own. Not every owner or manager has a strong understanding of the accounting cycle or knows how to tackle some of the minutiae that comes with operating a business. That is okay, that is what I am for. Some of my favorite tasks include turning messy records into meaningful reports and financials that help owners and managers understand the performance of their businesses. Here is a real business scenario I was recently privileged to be a part of, maybe this will help you with your business or firm…
A few days ago, I was listening to two co-proprietors of a local niche business discuss ways to be a more competitive employer. As most reading this know, the climate for hiring and retaining qualified and productive staff has been nothing short of a true challenge over the last several years.
In short, one of their ideas was to offer what they called “unlimited PTO”. However, they were having difficulty bringing this program to fruition given all the minutiae that may surround a concept like this. I asked for a few days to work on the idea.
Turns out, what they were aiming for already existed. No inventing or reinventing was needed. On the surface using a term like “unlimited”, especially referring to PTO, can be misleading to the employee and/or a liability to the employer. Probably the only time the term unlimited should be used is when referring to coffee. There is a better term, “responsible time off”.
Essentially responsible time off does not set a minimum or maximum, it is passive but not misleading. A responsible time off program would give employees the opportunity to take time, is not limited per se, and helps to promote work-life balance. However, it still gives the employer the opportunity to permit such around the needs of the business. There are many businesses that may have a busy season; accounting firms have tax time, retail stores have holidays, or agriculture operations have various growing seasons…to name a few. It would seem inappropriate for an employee to be gone for an extended period during the respective seasons. However, during the off seasons being out of the office or away from the computer for more than the standard one- or two-week PTO may be appropriate and possibly beneficial to the employee. Seems to be the best of both worlds.