CUTTING DOWN ON SICK LEAVE: AN INCENTIVE PROGRAM
No new employees! Cover it with what you have! Sound familiar? With fire service budgets becoming tighter all the time, fire administrators frequently are looking for new ways to economize while still providing acceptable levels of service. If you can’t get new employees, you’re left trying to find a way to get more work out of your present workers.
Since 1986, the City of Orlando (FL) Fire Department has been working with other city officials and the local firefighters’ union to do just that by reforming the sick leave program for all OFD employees. To date, the program has cut the use of sick leave by more than 45 percent, while offering employees who use little or no sick leave additional vacation or cash payments.
In 1986, the OFD used a total of almost 25,000 hours of sick leave. In 1992, department sick leave use was a little more than 14,000 hours. The saving is equivalent to the annual salaries of more than four full-time firefighters!
PROGRAM ELEMENTS
“The program changes have taken a ‘carrot-and-stick’ approach to the problem,” says Orlando Fire Chief Robert Bowman. “We have made it more difficult to use unwarranted sick leave, and we have made it much more rewarding not to use it.”
The basic elements of the program are the following:
- Our labor agreements and policies clearly define the conditions under which sick leave may be taken. They include
-Medical, dental, or optical examination or treatment for 40-hour employees only. Twenty-four hour personnel may use sick leave for prescribed medical treatment that falls on duty days.
-Incapacitation because of illness or injury.
-Care of and attendance to a member of an employee’s family who resides in the same household and is afflicted with a serious illness or injury. Hiis is a valid reason only when no other person is available to care for said individual or his/her hospitalization is required.
—The health of an employee’s coworkers would be jeopardized by exposure to the employee’s contagious disease.
- We have cut the sick leave accrual rate for 4()-hour employees from I 5 days (104 hours) per year to 12 days (96 hours) per year. For shift personnel, the sick leave accrual rate went from 2.5 hours per week (130 hours/ year) to 2.31 hours per week (120 hours/year).
- While the city may require medical documentation any time there is just cause to believe that an employee is improperly using sick leave, we agreed not to require a doctor’s documentation unless a firefighter has used more than 96 hours of sick leave in a 12-month period. In that situation, a doctor’s statement would be required for all sick leave used by that employee during the next 12 months. In addition, a doctor’s statement is required when a 40-hour employee is out three or more consecutive work
- days or a shift employee is off for two or more consecutive tours of duty.
- Monthly sick leave reports charting the sick leave for each program’s employees are provided to specific program managers. Earlier this year, the reports were placed on-line on the city computer system, so they are now instantly available to managers.
The amount of sick leave used and available during the year is listed, along with similar information about the employee’s vacation leave, on each biweekly pay Stub.
“What we were trying to do was clearly define how sick leave could be used and agree that employees could be held accountable for how they use it,” says Orlando Labor Relations Official Steve Valis. “We also felt it was important to give managers the information they needed on a current basis to spot any patterns and to be fully aware of what their employees were doing.”
The city’s revised sick leave incentive program also rewards employees more equitably for not using sick leave. The program now breaks down the year into four quarters and rewards workers who work through a quarter without using sick leave. Even if an employee is off for two weeks during one quarter, a reason still exists for the employee to monitor his/ her sick leave for the other three quarters. For each quarter in which no sick leave is used, a 40-hour employee can convert seven hours of his or her sick leave into vacation time or cash. Shift personnel are allowed a conversion of 8.75 hours. If an employee uses no sick leave during the fiscal year, the city grants him or her a bonus of 12 hours of additional vacation time, sick leave, or pay (40-hour employees) or a bonus of 15 hours for shift workers. This means that between the conversions and bonus, a 40-hour employee who uses no sick leave can receive 40 additional hours of vacation or pay, and a shift employee can receive 50 additional vacation hours or equivalent payment. The incentive program runs each year from the first pay period in October through the last pay period in September. The cash bonuses or vacation credits are paid in mid-December.
The city also raised the amount of sick leave for which an employee can be paid at retirement to encourage less frequent usage as employees near retirement. Shift firefighters now can be paid for up to 663 hours of unused sick leave at retirement; 40-hour sworn employees can be paid for a maximum of 533 hours. (Employees can accrue an unlimited number of sick leave hours during their careers and are paid for one-third of those hours when they retire, subject to the maximums outlined above.)
PROGRAM BENEFITS
As everyone knows, nothing is free. In 1992, 312 of our 356 employees were eligible for some sort of conversion or bonus under the program. Eighty-three percent of the employees took their awards in cash, while 17 percent opted for additional vacation. Employees converted 8,055.25 hours of sick leave into vacation or cash. They received cash or vacation bonuses totaling another 2,253 hours, for a total of 10,308.25 hours of bonus payments or additional vacation. The estimated value of these conversion and bonus hours was §156,587.87.
So where are the savings? First, the city saves almost 1,000 hours in sick leave payments each year. In addition, as noted earlier, the city did decrease the sick leave accrual rate for all employees. The rate was decreased by 10 hours per year for each shift employee and by eight hours for 40-hour workers. Seventy-eight percent of the hours paid to employees represented converted sick leave hours, which again decreased the number of sick leave hours on the books.
But the big savings comes in the area of overtime. The bonuses and conversions are paid at a straight-time hourly rate In the past, when sick time was used, it often resulted not only in paying the employee using the sick time but also in paying time-andone-half overtime to the worker who filled the missing employee’s slot.
“We really did not design the program to save the city massive amounts of money,” Valis says. “But we are clearly rewarding the employee who is coming to work each day. We also wanted to change employee attitudes about the use of sick leave.”
“I know that the program is helping us decrease overtime costs,” Chief Bowman observes. “It also has made managing our shifts easier for the managers and has allowed for greater participation in activities such as training.”
“The incentive program has been well-received in the field,” says District Chief Glenn Kin near, a 19-year department veteran. “There is a noticeable change in attitude on shift regarding the use of sick leave.”
Chief Kinnear adds that if the program has a downside, it may be that it encourages employees who are really sick to come in and tough it out to keep their records intact: “I’ve seen more than a few employees come to work who, in the old days, would have stayed home. It raises some concerns that they could infect coworkers; but on the other hand, there hasn’t been a run of the plague through the stations.”
Under the new policy, an employee who may pose a threat to coworkers can be relieved of duty and sent to the city physician. “We have to send a sick employee home once or twice a year,” Chief Bowman admits.
IAFF Local 1365 President Lt. Randy Hartman praises the program. “It has a lot of pluses. The program has enough flexibility so that no one is unduly penalized, and the bonus payments around Christmas are most welcome.”
Another recently established initiative cuts sick leave through a more aggressive light-duty policy for those injured in the line of duty. Until the change, those injured in the line of duty received workers’ compensation equal to two-thirds of their salaries and were given the option of working light duty or supplementing their pay with sick leave. In most cases, the sick leave later was refunded following action by an interim disability committee and the fire chief. Under the new policy, firefighters injured in the line of duty are required to perform light-duty assignments for which they are cleared by the city physician.
The light-duty employees are given such tasks as typing, answering phones, processing reports, reviewing trauma reports, delivering mail and supplies, assisting with fire prevention activities, and other special projects. The light-duty employees are placed on a five-day, 40-hour workweek and are paid full salary. They are allowed to go to medical appointments or therapy for the on-duty injury as required.
“In either case, since the city is selfinsured, we were paying 100 percent of the cost of the injury time off,” says Chief Bowman. “Now we are gaining some benefit for the employee payments. And this way, we have the opportunity to monitor the employee’s progress and get additional staff support at the same time.
“After years on shift, a five-day workweek sometimes gives the employee additional motivation to get well and return to shift,” he adds. All employees must receive full medical clearance before returning to combat duties.
“You don’t solve sick leave and injury leave problems with one step,” according to Valis. “You solve them with a series of actions that ensure you reward the people who stay on the job in the right ways, give your managers information with which to manage, and provide employees with a reason to monitor their own sick leave usage.
“You save some money, but more importantly, you have more of your highly trained employees on the job serving the taxpayers,” Valis notes. “And in today’s political climate, anything that saves money and improves the level of serv ice is worth looking at.”
