A job market that strongly favors candidates continues, especially considering technology professionals. At the same time, modern IT pros want the ability to better balance their personal and professional lives. This desire makes sense as COVID-19 slowly wanes across the globe. Providing your employees with more PTO becomes critical in this scenario.
With an eye towards keeping your staff happy, check out these insights on why increasing PTO benefits makes sense. In the end, you want to keep your company’s retention rate as high as possible. Improving PTO and its related benefits ultimately helps your company achieve this goal. Let’s take a closer look.
It remains a stressful time in the world, which might adversely affect your employees’ mental health. Since May is Mental Health Awareness Month, take the time to re-engineer your company’s time-off policies. Simply providing an extra mental health day when needed goes a long way in boosting employee morale.
Also, consider providing extra PTO when a stressful project is successfully completed. It serves as a nice bonus after many long days during crunch time.
Somewhat surprisingly, a recent study noted that 60 percent of employees leave unused PTO days at year-end. In fact, those unused days account for $172 billion in value. So remind your staff to regularly use all their earned PTO each and every year. At the minimum, institute a policy to roll over any unused days into the next year. PTO plays a big role in their happiness while providing the means for balancing their personal and professional lives.
We previously mentioned the tight market for talented software engineers and tech professionals. Offering extra PTO each year helps differentiate your organization in the battle for IT talent. While some organizations offer unlimited PTO, even providing significantly more than the national average of 11 days helps somewhat. It also plays a critical role in the happiness of your current employees, as noted earlier.
Remember that employee morale also directly influences your company’s retention rate. In short, happy workers remain less likely to look for other opportunities. So providing extra PTO shows you care about your staff and helps build a culture able to attract the best. Expect your company’s Glassdoor ratings to improve as a result!
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