Episode 124: Let’s Talk About Vacation Days for Your Employees

Episode 124: Let’s Talk About Vacation Days for Your Employees

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners podcast with your host, Brandon Condrey and Brandon Schoen.

Brandon Schoen:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners podcast. The only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world to take it to the next level on wind. So thank you guys for being here and joining us today on the show. We got some great feedback from you guys. You guys like answering the frequently asked questions. So we're gonna do another quick live answer your question that you guys wrote into us. So if you guys do have questions, send them to us. Hello at Profit Cleaners dot com. We would love to highlight your question on the show,

but let's jump into it. Brandon, we got an interesting hiring or not hiring question. It's more of a vacation question, right? Benefits. A benefits, yeah, benefits question. So let's jump into it if you guys have employees, if you don't yet, you will at some point. So this is something you definitely wanna know and want something to think about 'cause you're gonna be building culture,

you wanna want people to stick around. So let's tell people about our paid time off policy and how we do it, Brandon, and what's worked, what hasn't worked, maybe some problems we've had in the past. Let's jump into it. Sure. Yeah. So this came up because someone wrote in how many unpaid days off slash sick days do you typically give your employees running into an issue where some of our crew is taking way too many vacation days,

so I need more detail from this person. You know like was it unlimited PTO before and you were upset that they're, they're take, they're using it. Like that's what it sounds like to me from the get go. So to answer the question from the outset, we offer both. We offer sick time and paid vacation time and they're separate. So the sick time is state mandated by New Mexico.

And so we just follow the state mandate, which if memory serves as they get 0.64, six hours for every 40 hours work is what I want to say. And so it amounts to, it's like a day off every two weeks or something and there's a cap on it, it caps out at a certain time and there's a list of allowable uses for it,

which includes like your kid's sick or you have to go to a doctor's appointment. And all in all, it was a really good bill, like a good law. I'm happy they did it. It was done in such a way that it takes into account business owners like stance. 'cause there was one before that that was crazy that didn't pass. And I was really thankful for that because that one was very punitive on employees if you didn't let 'em take it like there was a big lawsuit risk.

So I'm glad that the sick time came off. Most places in the United States do not require paid sick time. And so businesses will sometimes offer an excess of PTO and you can use it for sick time as well or they'll offer a very minimum amount of sick time. There's no rule across it, it's just if you're in a place that has mandated it,

go with the mandate. So sick time, yes, we've talked about this before but I would argue that it's better for you to offer sick time because you do not want a sick employee coming in, one sick employee that you've forced to come in because you don't have paid time off could turn into a whole sick crew that you now have to cancel a week's worth of cleanings depending on what thing that they are ill with,

which is not gonna be good for revenue. So I would say as a general healthy workplace sort of thing, you do not want people to come in sick. That's usually bad news. Now a lot of people will default to, they're lying, they're not really sick. I'm like, well I mean maybe like the ones that you want to weed out that are lying,

you wanna weed out the ones that are like hung over the ones that are partying too much or the ones that are lying because they're gonna go take a vacation and they're calling out sick at the last minute. Like that's not a good way to work. But it's a two-way street. Like you as the company owner, the business owner, you have to appreciate that people are human.

Like all of us listening to this in your youth, 100% of us have ditched a day of school have called in sick to work when you felt totally fine just because work is a terrible place to go. Like it was like the worst job of my life. I didn't want to go there so I called in sick. Someone out there is doing that like so you gotta understand that your employees are human and they're doing that.

Yeah, absolutely. And did we start with paid time off? I'm trying to remember in the beginning Brandon, if we actually started with that or we implemented that further in but We didn't, we, that's a relatively new change for like the vacation time. So we wanted to the whole time like it's always a good thing. But when we were brand new and strapped for cash,

it was just like, I didn't think we would ever get there. But like you know, obviously we did but it just seemed so hard to swallow that we have to pay you what little money we have for you not to work. But that's the closed mindset, scarcity brain talking to you that like that's not a good idea. But over time I remember polling the employees one time like what should we offer?

They like a paid vacation after you've been here for whatever time. And so that's what we implemented in the end. We did add paid vacation and so if you've been here for a year, you get a week and then it goes up to three weeks I think depending on tenure. And we don't have that many people that have been here long enough to get the three weeks.

But part of any benefit that you offer is they're gonna use it. So like you can't put out their paid vacation time and hope that they won't use it 'cause they just like you so much. It's just a nice thing to have. Like people are gonna request time off and you have to grant it if you tell them you get paid time off but decline every request that's gonna make people so mad that's when they start calling in sick when really they just wanted to take a day off to go do whatever.

Yeah, exactly. And if you don't have something in place like this, like you're offering this, people are like you said Brandon, it's a two-way street. So people are gonna take advantage of like if you're not allowing to do it, they're just gonna do it on their own and they're gonna take a day off. And sometimes people just needed a mental break,

a mental day off that's fine. But make it easy for 'em. I think in the beginning, if I remember correctly Brandon, we were, people would submit requests for days off, right? We had like a box or something in the office and Claudia, our office manager, we did in the beginning and then she took it over. But we have a calendar,

just a Google calendar, right? And it shows in the office everybody Is taking day off on, it's on public display. Yeah, it's on public display. You allow so many people to be off per day. Back in the day that was two, we would allow two people off. I think it's a lot more now because we have floaters to fill in.

But you know, it's a first come first serve basis and if you have the time, but back then it was just unpaid time. Like you could have the day off but you're not getting paid. Now we offer paid time and we, I want people to use it. I want you to get your vacation in because that means that you're happy to keep working here.

Are you gonna get taken advantage of? Probably, I mean someone's probably going to take their week off and then quit like as soon as the week's out. But from a legal standpoint, you gotta pay it. Like that stuff happens. That is part of the cost of doing business and you just have to make peace with, not everyone is gonna trust you to do the right thing and you can trust them as much as you want,

but like not everyone's gonna follow through. Not everyone's a decent person. Their motivations are different. That's the issue. Yeah, and I think a lot of it comes back to this is why you wanna build a strong culture in your brand. Because if you have strong culture, strong core values for example, if you're one of your core values like ours is honesty and integrity.

If you're recognizing your teams for that, they wanna be recognized for being honest and having integrity. So if they're lying about taking days off or doing something shady like that, that obviously doesn't align with your core values. And hopefully if you're building your culture correctly, you are gonna align with people that do value that core value and they're not gonna do things like that.

And you're gonna be doing other things in your business that get 'em excited to stick around that. It makes it a fun workplace, it's a great place to be like on and on and on. But that's, this is why you build culture so that people reciprocate back. You know, if you invest in your teams, if you put time and energy into them in different ways,

if you take 'em to lunch once in a while, do something nice for 'em, pay a cash bonus, whatever you're doing to keep 'em excited, incentivizing them and also showing them a way forward, it's very less likely that that's gonna happen because people are excited, they wanna be there, they don't wanna take advantage. I think that problem probably comes more from having a lack of culture maybe come having a lack of systems and and clarity in place for people to grow with your company.

And so that would maybe leave them wanting to do some things like that. But like you, like Brandon said, if you trust them, they will trust you and vice versa. You gotta build that relationship with your teams, build that culture. And I think that's a big part of it right there. Hey guys, so how can Profit Cleaners help you?

Three ways. First off, head over to a podcast or if you're on YouTube, we've got loads of free content. We're republishing the podcast here as well. Check out the podcast, it's a great place to start. Yep. Next you can grab our 10 x marketing course to help you bring your business up to seven figures. Get a bunch of customers,

you can check that out at Profit Cleaners dot com slash courses. And then lastly, if you just head to the website in general, Profit Cleaners dot com, there's lots of free tools on there, all the podcast episodes are on there. And then there's also a free masterclass that we run every week that you can still register for. Yeah, check,

check out the show notes and all sorts of resources. So hopefully that helps you guys. We'll see you guys soon. Yep. Take care. Keep Clean, keep it clean. So the other part of it too I think is you need to be very specific about the policy. So like don't just say everyone gets time off. Like there needs to be a policy that everyone gets to read and they have to acknowledge like in their employee handbook or whatever,

like this is what it is, here you go. You have to request time off this much in advance. There's only this many people off at a time. It's on a first come, first serve basis. Here's the repercussions. If you don't follow the policy, you just need to be very specific. Like when we had first started, when we first started hiring people in the office,

we had an unlimited PTO policy and we still do to a degree but there's only one person that ever tried to take advantage of it. And the way that that worked out was they took a the same day off every single week. So we were paying salary for someone to have a four hour, four day a week work week, but all the math we had done was on five days,

like a normal full-time job. So like if you're gonna go that route then let's just cut your pay by 20% and you can have that every Thursday off or whatever. And so that kind of irked me, but that was a, that was a blindside for me, like a blind spot. I wasn't thinking that someone would use the unlimited PTO to take one day off every single week and have it be the same day.

That in my mind is not. But we should have rid that into the policy. The policy should be, it has to be successive days and you can only do this much over a month. Like even though it's unlimited, you can still put restrictions on it. And so that sounds like what this question may have been is that someone's taking advantage of it by taking too many vacation days.

Well that's because you told 'em they could take that many or you're granting them that they're taking that many like that's in the end like they're just following whatever you told 'em. And so the nice thing about people is they will find the path of least resistance to get what they want. So if you don't spell it out, this is the policy, this is what we will allow,

they'll, they'll follow that to the letter but you have to tell them and you know if they're not doing that or trying to take a bunch of days off, you have to react. I mean you might have to fire people, you might have to do written warnings. Like if they're not gonna follow the policy, they're not the what other, their policies are they not following.

So maybe they're not a good fit for your company. So be intentional with the benefit but you need to understand that the benefit is for the employees not for you to be able to put a bullet point on the job listing that says we offer paid time off. Like that has to be on the other side. They actually have to be able to do that and you need to expect 'em to do that.

Like I remember when we made the, you get a week off vacation notice someone like 10 minutes after we had said that someone tried to take the entire next week off like right then I need it right now. Like you didn't need it before when you had to request it. Why do you need it now? Like what changed? It's just that we're gonna pay you to do it so you're gonna take it off.

And I think we worked something out with them in the end. But the idea is you should fully expect that people are gonna take that time off. You just have to make sure that whatever you can work with is something that will fit into reality financially but also into company culture. When we had unlimited pain time off, was that only for leadership or was that clean your stew Brandon?

I can't remember. It was only for office staff and I think our HR person set us straight in the end anyway. Like you can't have a differentiating policy for one or the other. But in the end I think we're all in the same paid time off calendar now, which is based on seniority. You get x amount of time off depending on how long you've worked there.

I like setting it up that way for paid time off because you can't get taken advantage of three weeks time off if your employee needs to be there for five years to get three weeks off. If they only have access to a week then what'd you lose? You lost a week for someone to take advantage of you and then they quit. Cool. That was a cheap mistake.

Like that was, you learned that very inexpensively and you know you're long timers, you're veteran employees that are gonna stay with you for years. They're not gonna mess around with that. They know that you got a good thing going and so they're gonna follow the policy. That's really, this all comes down to you need to hire an HR consultant to review your local policies and make sure that they are following the laws and that you're not in trouble.

HR is really to protect the company in the event that you get sued. But writing a good policy is like, I don't know, nine tenths of the battle. If they understand the policy then it should be fine. And then let's just talk about like the logistical part of this. Like let's say somebody does take a week off, you have multiple people doing this.

How do we offset the schedule? Is it through floaters, is it through hiring more people? Like what are we doing when that happens? Yeah, so we do it through floaters. So if you're taking a day off, we need more than a week's notice. If you're taking more than one day off in a row, we need more than 30 days notice you're supposed to tell us a month in advance if you're gonna take two days off.

That does not apply for sick time obviously. So if you're sick, you're sick, use the sick time. But for vacation time where you know are gonna be gone, we want to know that far in advance so that we can staff accordingly. And so part of that is filling in with floaters, which is the easy part. We already have them on staff and then the other part,

like if all the floaters were gone on a particular day or we were short staffed, we would just cut work on that particular team, try and shift work off of that team, run it as a two person crew instead of a three person crew. You just try and shuffle things around. The bigger you are the easier that gets. We have 14 teams that we can dilute work to 12 and Albuquerque two in Santa Fe,

so let's call it 12 teams. So we have 12 teams that we can, you know, shuffle things between and that makes it easy to absorb hits like that if we're short staffed. But really it's just about getting them to apply for it far enough in advance that you have enough time to plan ahead. Yeah, it really comes down to one of our other core values,

which is communication, you know and have being upfront and letting people know what's going on and if people are communicating the right way then everybody's fine. Yeah and we've caught people in lies before you will too. Like they are going to tell you that so-and-so's sick and then someone else will show you a picture of them at some concert or something that's happened more than once.

And if we were able to cover it and nothing happened bad to the company, I don't know, we just let that stuff slide man. Like quit being so gossipy behind the scenes. That's not good for employee morale if people are talking about you behind your back. But like one of the crazy ones was we denied a vacation request and the employee quit and said something terrible was happening with her son.

Her son was arrested and there were drugs involved and we were like, oh my God, like please deal with it any way you want. And then she came back a week later and told us that she lied and that her husband just took her to Mexico for the week. I'm like, you could've just told us that and we would've given you the vacation time,

you didn't have to quit. And like we rehired her 'cause she's a good employee, maybe not mentally, but as far as the cleaning part of it, like she does do well at that. It was just a very, I think she was worried about how we were gonna react to her taking time off. And so she way overcorrected for what she thought was the right course of action.

And you don't have to go overboard, you don't have to quit your job and make up some story about people getting arrested. Just tell us that, hey, my husband scored these crazy plane tickets. We'll work with people even if it's not inside the policy. Like let's say some employee notices that there's only one person off next week and I have this chance to take a time off and you're asking me two days beforehand if we can accommodate that request reasonably sure man,

we'll do that. I'm not gonna punish you if you have an opportunity to do something cool and we as a company can cover it without too much skin off of our back. Like, yeah man, let's do it. Like that's a give and take relationship. We're paying you guys to not work and that's part of the American dream, man. You work for a company,

you get some paid time off, it shouldn't be just work, work, work until you die. Like it's, this is part of the sustainable part of Sandia, Green, Clean is we want the employees to also claim their weekend, not just the customers. Yeah, absolutely. And I think again, it just ties back to your core values and if that's happening,

reiterate your core values and recognize people for that. And if people are violating those core values, just be like, Hey, we gotta give you a warning. Can't do that. We'll work with you, but next time, just be honest with us, you know, and praise people for being honest and and do that publicly as much as you can.

But I think ultimately having a great workforce is hard enough. So as much as you can do to to work with your people, incentivize them for greatness, but also work with them, like Brandon said, you know, if it's not totally in the policy, but you can accommodate it, help your people out, build your trust, build that relationship with them,

they're gonna help accommodate you. I mean, heck man, they're one of your biggest investments, so they're helping you deploy your service into the market. So like make them feel great and make, try to work with them, try to make 'em feel great about it if you can. But just be really clear with it, like Brandon said in the beginning,

be very clear with your policies and enforce those core values and you should be fine. So yeah. Yeah, I think that pretty much wraps it up. So we'll do more of these kind of questions guys, but we've been getting quite a few more of these from time to time. So we will continue to add value to your business, keep listening to the podcast.

If you guys are getting value in these shows, if you're learning something, if it's helping with a new perspective, a new idea, a new strategy, new way of doing paid time off or vacation time, please like the show, share it, let someone know about it and pay the price. Guys, we're not running a bunch of crazy ads on these shows,

so please help us out, leave us a review, share it out there. We'll keep doing these shows and keep adding value to your life and your business. And I think that's pretty much it, right Brandon? I mean, you gotta keep it clean, obviously, obviously keep it clean. Guys, Thanks for joining us today. To get more info,

including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff, head over to Profit Cleaners dot com and remember, keep it clean.