Lacey: Great! Glad to be here today.
Brandon: So, we’re sitting here, it’s the middle of September, school just started.
Lacey: It did!
Brandon: Kids are back. You personally, your daughter is in school for the first time.
Lacey: She is, she just started kindergarten.
Brandon: That’s crazy.
Lacey: It is crazy!
Brandon: And as you know with having a kid in school, there’s a lot of things that come up out of nowhere whether it’s sickness or conferences that are going to come up, and maybe you haven’t gotten to the conferences yet. But let’s just talk about some scenarios here. What happens when you’re daughter’s sick and in school, what do you do for work? What happens?
Lacey: Yeah, it’s interesting. So she started actually, we’re going on our third week now, and she actually missed a day of school last week already. So it’s been quite the interesting transition going from having a really flexible daycare where I could drop her off very early in the morning and pick her up after 5 o’clock at night, which was helpful for me. And now dealing with a situation where there are attendance rules and all of that. I wasn’t expecting her to get sick so quickly and I think some of my clients are experiencing that now, too, with employees that are having to call off from work because their kids are sick. So that’s probably one of the biggest conversations I’m having right now with my clients is, our employees’ children are back in school now. Lots of kids together equals lots of germs being shared, and kids are bound to get sick.
Brandon: And the irony about staying home with your kid for being sick is that you’re bound to get it, too, right?
Lacey: Yes!
Brandon: So you might go back to work for one day and then come back and you’re sick and bedridden, so it’s like, how do you manage that as a parent, especially with two working parents or single parents who are working, how do you manage all of that?
Lacey: Yeah, I think it can be challenging. There’s a couple things that employers should be aware of, especially for the listeners out there that have companies here in Oregon, for those of you with businesses with 25 or more employees, a lot of times when we think about family medical leave, we think it’s this really formal thing and it’s when someone has a baby or they need to have surgery and they take time off from work.
Brandon: That’s initially what I think of.
Lacey: Right! Well, there’s something called Oregon Sick Child Leave, and so this is leave that is available to employees that have worked for a business for 180 days, so about 6 months, that are working an average of 25 hours a week, so these are your part-time employees who have worked for you for just 6 months—they could qualify for this. And what this leave is available for is when your kiddo gets sick, like a cold or maybe the stomach flu or chicken pox, not serious health condition type leaves where you have to take extended time off.
Brandon: So you’re talking about extended leaves—that’s under OFLA?
Lacey: It could be both. So you might take time off because your child has a really serious health condition and they’re getting treatment for it. Let’s say, for example, that a child had cancer and they were undergoing chemotherapy and you had to be off for an extended period of time. That’s one type of leave, this leave I’m talking about is just called Sick Child Leave. It’s just for those instances, like with Avery last Friday—she had a fever in the morning and a really runny nose and I didn’t feel comfortable sending her to school. So you keep
the kid home, and the leave is so you can stay home with the child, it’s not meant to be that extra day to have a three day weekend, it’s really that the child is ill.It can be challenging for employers to manage this. You’re not allowed to require documentation until the fourth absence. So four occurrences where the employee, or parent, has to take time off work, you can start asking for documentation. The caveat to that is, do you take your kid to the doctor when they have a runny nose? Not usually. And if the employer requires that the employee get a note, then the employer is responsible for paying any out-of-pocket costs associated.
So this Sick Child Leave—not many people are aware of it. They should be, especially if you’re a company with over 25 employees.
Brandon: I’ve never heard of it!
Lacey: I think just being aware that kids are going to get sick, your employees that have children may need to miss work, especially in this month and next month. I think as time goes on in the school year, employers usually see the absences for sick children decrease.
I also have some clients right now who are talking about the flu. There’s been some stuff on the radio, even, and on TV about people paying attention to flu shots and that employers are allowed to offer these flu shot clinics to their employees, and I’ve been coordinating some of those for my clients. So what we do is we can coordinate with different people. There are companies that specialize in this, they’ll come out to your site, they’ll administer flu shots for your employees, and they’ll bill directly to the insurance carrier. So it’s kind of a cool benefit that you can provide. The employees then don’t need to go to a pharmacy or their doctor to get flu shots.
Brandon: So let’s talk one more time about this sick leave that’s available. How many days are available? And just maybe for those that are employees, they may want to take advantage of something like this. And also, just so employers are aware of how this is a law.
Lacey: Right, so the maximum amount is twelve weeks, 480 hours. Most people don’t use up that much time for sick child leave.
Brandon: Crazy. Who could take that much time unpaid?!
Lacey: Right! It’s unpaid time off. You’re allowed to use vacation or PTO. For companies that are in Portland and are required to provide Portland Paid Sick Leave—
Brandon: Which is probably going to be Oregon statewide in 2016.
Lacey: It will, come January. So it will be any listeners out there who have businesses here in Oregon.
Brandon: Yeah, and we actually have a podcast on that too, so I’ll just reference that, we’ll put a link in the show notes for that.
Lacey: Great. Yeah, the Oregon State Sick Leave, I think it’s going to be complicated, so listeners will definitely want to pay attention to whether or not they qualify for that. But those absences we’re talking about, that fall under the Sick Child Leave, those are qualified absences under Portland Paid Sick Leave right now. So if you’re not offering Portland Paid Sick Leave and you’ve got 6 or more employees in Portland right now, you should be paying attention to that, because that time that they’re taking up to the 40 hours should be paid.
Brandon: Ok, so we’ve talked about sickness, but what about when conferences come up? Because those are inevitable.
Lacey: Right! They are, and events.
Brandon: And tutoring, or whatever you need to be involved in when your child is behind or just needs a little extra care, where you have to be really involved with the teachers or the school. How do you manage that, when it doesn’t fall under the sick leave stuff?
Lacey: Yeah. And there are things that are, the extra support for the kids like you said, tutoring or when we have to go to conferences. Then there are the fun things!
Brandon: Sports!
Lacey: Sports or musicals or plays that kids might be involved in that employees want to take time off. So obviously, making sure your employees are aware of the time off request standard procedure that you have, and then also what the benefits are in terms of paid time for that. Allowing flexible schedules, too—I think that
can be a great way to set yourself apart from other businesses. And I’m not saying that we want to allow employees to flex necessarily every week, but allowing some flexibility for when those things come up and having a culture or an environment in your business where you demonstrate to employees that you care about that kind of stuff, you care about them as a human being just like they are an employee, we understand that people have lives and families. I think that’s something that employers can do that can be really, really helpful to retain some of the top talent that they have.Brandon: Let me ask you this, because you’re talking about the flexible schedule stuff to try to alleviate some of the pain of like, I have to go pick up my kid! Or that kind of stuff. What have you seen employers do? Because to me, how do you put this kind of stuff down in a policy? Hey, we’re going to have flexible schedules versus like, it ebbs and flows with the requests that come in. You talked about a culture of flexible schedules. What have you seen employers do to communicate that?
Lacey: It depends on the environment. In a professional services environment like we have, the flexible schedule is a little bit easier, I think, versus maybe a manufacturing facility.
Brandon: Where you’re sitting on a line.
Lacey: Yeah! And there’s a shift change where there has to be coverage or a retail or restaurant environment. That’s more challenging.
I think when I say flexible, I mean giving the employees the ability to ask for time off without it feeling like there’s going to be some punishment or discipline associated with it. And that comes to training the managers. So even in just the way the managers respond to requests, that can change the culture and the dynamic in the work group, that department, the business, whatever it is. If I don’t feel comfortable going to my manager to say, Hey, Avery has a conference next week and it’s at 3. The teachers aren’t going to stay much past 5 or 6, so it’s at 3 and that’s when I need to be there. I’ll need to leave here at 2:30, are you comfortable with that? Having a manager that responds positively and supportively—that can go a long way.
Brandon: What you’re also saying is when you’re going to leave at 3 to pick up Avery, it doesn’t mean you’re done for the day necessarily?
Lacey: Not necessarily.
Brandon: What you’re saying is that you’re probably going to make up that time somewhere else.
Lacey: Potentially yeah.
Brandon: And if not, it probably works out in the end. You’ll put a 50 hour work week in versis a 35 hour for one week.
Lacey: Exactly. And we want to pay attention to whether folks are exempt or non-exempt.
Brandon: Definitely.
Lacey: Using PTO, how you require employees to use it, whether it’s in 1 hour increments or 4 hour increments, all this stuff is going to come into play. So making sure that your systems for scheduling and time off are really dialed in right now, I think that’s going to be really important for employers.
Brandon: Have you ever seen where the flexible schedule, even if it’s not written down in a policy somewhere or in a handbook, where it’s backfired and it’s kind of ruined the culture? Here’s an example: let’s say there are a few people who are constantly using the flexible schedule and then there are some people who are tied to their desk and their workload doesn’t allow them to get out so there’s maybe some jealousy. Have you seen that? Because that has to exist.
Lacey: That does exist. I think the remedy for that is having managers be held responsible for managing performance. So that to me sounds like a performance issue. Maybe it’s
created by people not working a full 8 hour day, but what it really sounds like is there’s people who are working hard getting their work done and there’s other people who maybe aren’t. So making sure employees understand what the expectations are and when they’re not meeting expectations they’re held accountable for that, and that managers are held accountable for doing all of that stuff—using one-on-ones to check in with employees about workload and stuff like that I think can be helpful so hopefully you can catch the fact that maybe there’s somebody who’s feeling like they carry most of the weight. And having managers have a sense of what people are working on, that can help too.Brandon: Being back to school, what else is pretty crazy that as a parent with a child in school or children in school, what else comes up that you’ve seen?
Lacey: You know, I think that the sickness thing is really the big hot topic and the scheduling piece. One thing I was hoping we could talk with listeners about is for those companies out there that employ people, minors that are in school, there are things that we should be thinking about. So I know that I have clients that have 16 or 17 year olds working for them, we have a lot of Xenium clients that do that. So I think it would be great if we could talk a little bit about the requirements that employers have, specifically here in Oregon. I have a background in some of the Washington rules, too, so one of the things that’s really important right off the bat is employers have all of their proper documentation to even be able to employ minors. Washington and Oregon require that you go through the proper steps and fill out the appropriate paperwork. All of that stuff’s available on Washington’s L&I website and the BOLI website for Oregon.
So that’s the first step, make sure that you’re set up to even be able to have minors working for you. And then there are a couple things to think about. One is schedules, so that includes the number of hours they can work in a week, the number of hours they can work in a day, what are their rest and meal periods that are required for minors that are working, because they’re different than for people that are over 18. And most of the time I would be surprised if anyone ever had a minor that was an exempt employee where you didn’t have to worry about those rest periods. So for the most part we’re just going to be talking about hourly, non-exempt minor employees.
And then there’s also some types of work that minors aren’t allowed to do. So understanding from the highest level of leadership perspective, what are the 16, 17, 15 year olds doing? Because there are some types of equipment and work that they’re not allowed to do.
Brandon: That’s very interesting. Anything else that comes to mind? This has been pretty interesting. I have two kids, but neither of them are in school yet and I haven’t run into this issue. My wife’s also a stay at home mom, so this may not even be an issue long term for me, but I know other people who are listening go through this issue all the time and I’m sure they, whether they’re managers or employees, they want to know what’s available to them.
Lacey: Yep. I think just if there’s any one takeaway for the folks that are listening to this podcast today, it’s just make sure your managers are communicating with the human resource department or Xenium if you have questions as it relates to employees taking time off of work because their children are sick, employees missing work themselves because they’re sick, and make sure that your schedules and what your minor employees are doing is within the rules for the particular state you’re working in. All of that stuff is really critical. It should be top of mind right now.
Brandon: Awesome. Lacey, thanks again for joining the podcast, it’s been awesome.
Lacey: Sure, thanks! Great to be here.