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If there are two things the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center ought to understand, it’s death and education. The first it sees every day. The second is its reason for existing (its motto: “We practice what we teach”). The two topics have even been part of the hospital’s employee benefits package, through which workers have received extra paid days off to attend the funerals of loved ones and for continuing education.
Until now. Starting with last Friday’s paycheck, University Hospital workers will no longer enjoy such perks. From now on, such time off will have to come out of staffers’ vacation and sick time.
Donna Koeppel, the hospital’s vice president for human resources, says that recent internal surveys showed University employees enjoying an abundant collection of benefits. She says that now, however, increased competition in the health-care industry has nudged the hospital toward greater stinginess.
Predictably, the announcement has angered some employees, who have enjoyed the benefits for years. “You would think that if anyone appreciated taking time off for a funeral, it would be a hospital,” says one nurse who asks not to be named.
But hospital administrators say they made the decision after reviewing their employees’ compensation schedule and finding it unusually generous.
Koeppel explains that compared with perks at other area hospitals, those at UCHSC are more than ample–three weeks of vacation instead of two for under five years of service, ten holidays instead of six, four paid sick days–and notes that they are a holdover from the time when the hospital was a state agency with typically bountiful benefits.
The reason for the revised plan is “pretty simple,” Koeppel says. “We, like every other hospital, have to put considerable effort into holding down health-care costs for the consumer.” Although making bereavement leave part of a worker’s vacation time will save only an estimated $80,000 a year, Koeppel says the savings is part of a larger cost-cutting program over the past year that has included restructuring contracts and closing the hospital catering department.
It’s not known how University Hospital’s bereavement policy compares with that of other employers. “As far as funeral leave, I haven’t even kept track of that,” says Patty Goodwin, a researcher for the Mountain States Employers Council, a Denver company that has surveyed local companies’ compensation packages since 1939. She notes, however, that the last time the council asked, fewer than 20 percent of companies offered bereavement benefits in addition to vacation and sick time. As for policies regarding time off for work-related classes or seminars, Goodwin says those vary so widely that comparisons are not possible.
Through the old University Hospital policy, an employee could request several days off to attend or plan the funeral of a relative, and his manager generally would approve it. The same held true for short-term continuing education not required by the hospital but still relevant to the worker’s job. (Mandatory training is covered under the new policy.)
The bereavement and education days off were in addition to a worker’s paid vacation. Beginning this week, an employee can still request the time off–as long as he is willing to take it out of his finite pool of designated earned days off.
“I realize that trimming costs is often painful for those who are affected and that the necessity for the cuts is not always apparent,” Joyce Cashman, the hospital’s executive vice president, wrote in a recent memo to the approximately 2,000 affected employees. “In the past, health-care organizations merely raised their rates to cover additional expenses, but neither managed care nor informed consumers will allow those options today.”
The changes mean the hospital is joining an increasingly large number of employers looking to cut the cost of worker benefits. It used to be that when Joe Laborer joined Acme Inc., he would typically earn two weeks of vacation and have access to five sick days and three personal days. The problem was that, coincidentally, not-so-ethical workers would call in sick exactly five times. In other words, employers say, employees didn’t have much incentive to stay healthy.
As a result, says Julia Chivers of William M. Mercer Inc., a national employment research firm, many companies now simply tell their workers they have a certain number of days off each year to be used for whatever purpose they wish. She adds that a recent survey shows this trend to be particularly strong in the health-care industry.
The good news for workers is that they may use what once were referred to as sick days for skiing if they want to; as far as the company is concerned, a day off is a day off. That rewards workers for staying healthy, or at least for not calling in sick when they aren’t.
The bad news is that when a company switches from the old plan to the new, it reduces the total number of the worker’s potential days off–including those used for illness, education and bereavement. “These paid-time-off packages tend to drop days off,” says Chivers. “There’s not one-to-one correlation at all.”
Still, for many Denver-area hospitals in what is one of the country’s most competitive health-care markets, reducing benefits is a better solution than the alternative. “We’ve got some complaints,” acknowledges Koeppel. But, she adds, “we’ve also heard from some employees who thanked us for doing this instead of laying off workers.
