Archbright Reviews

There are many reasons Archbright made changes to its PTO policy, however taking money from employees was not one of them. To start with, changes in 2018 to Washington State law affected our existing PTO Plan. For example, we could no longer cap accrual for PTO to keep banks from growing without limits. This law change gave us an opportunity to not only look at PTO but to also revamp our overall total rewards program -– creating a plan that would be desirable for new talent, increase our competitiveness in the Seattle market, and encourage our employees to take time off. We surveyed and interviewed every employee to learn what employee benefits were working and how we could improve our fringe benefits we offer. Taking employee desires and market data into account, in October we debuted our new Keystone program that, as a package, is designed to offer a variety of time-off plans in addition to increased health and transit benefits, plus more. Employees now have more than an accrual PTO plan and paid holidays – they have 4 or 6 weeks of front-loaded PTO, 4 weeks paid Parental Leave, 11 paid holidays, a 6-week paid Sabbatical at 15 and 25 years tenure, and a grandfathered sick plan to retain hours from the old PTO plan. We’d like to directly address the employee’s comments and provide more context: Under the Pros section, in addition to the support listed, Archbright also offers our members employment law advice and labor negotiation services. ‘without warning’ the company was ‘effectively stealing’ time off. As the employee notes, we provided notice 8 weeks before the transition. We also worked diligently in the last two months of the year approving as much time off as possible. All hours up to 56 hours were rolled into the front-loaded hours effective 1/1/19; the remaining hours over 56 hours were placed in a sick bank for use. We disagree with the use of the word ‘stealing’ - the employee can still use that time. Regarding the employee’s comments that there was ‘no option for payout’ and that we suggested a ‘…payout would be a financial burden to Archbright…’ It is true we did not provide an option for payout. It is a hardship for any company to pay accrued time to the entire employee population at once while also having to accrue for ongoing PTO. The company does accrue for PTO (then and now) on our financials in compliance with accounting standards. We disagree with the opinion that a total cash payout for this accrual along with ongoing accruals for the new plan is not too high a cash burden. This is why we made the best financial decision for organizational health, while also making sure employees still had access to leave already earned before the new plan went into effect. ‘What was not taken into account is that employees who have unused time off banks are usually strong/dedicated performers that have not utilized PTO for away that mostly benefits Archbright.’ We strongly disagree and with few exceptions, we find that our highest performers and highest accountable employees did not have an issue with the transition from the old PTO plan to the new PTO plan. Many of them positively worked with us to take more time off through year-end than they originally planned. They understand that the time is not lost to them; many of them recalled prior leaves or illnesses for more than three days and saw the benefit of the grandfathered sick plan to be used for those occurrences in the future. For example, an employee could the grandfathered sick bank for absence related to a flu that last longer than three days without having to use their frontloaded PTO first. ‘In my opinion this was a calculated to save Archbright money on the backs of good employees. We could not disagree more. After seeking every employee’s opinion on fringe benefits, we invested resources into our total benefit program. Our approach was to learn from employees and craft a time-off suite of programs that is desirable to existing employees, attractive to prospective employees, and helps a small company like ours compete with the big dogs in our neighborhood – Amazon, Microsoft, T-Mobile, & Healthcare to name a few. Another goal of our new program was to enable employees to plan their time away with a 12-month horizon so they can commit to longer stretches of PTO. Not only does this allow employees to disconnect and truly recharge in 1- and 2-week increments (as opposed to a few days here and there once they have enough hours accrued), it also allows for teams to more effectively plan assignments around time away without causing extra burden for coverage or decreases in productivity. It is our sincere intention to provide the benefits our employees need to thrive both in their personal lives and at work.