Unpaid humanitarian leave expands vacation and leave benefits
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, several nurses from McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) in Montreal travelled south to assist. The previous year, others had flown to Thailand to assist in the wake of the 2004 tsunami.
Unpaid humanitarian leave is just one of the ways MUHC has enhanced its vacation and time-off benefits and one of the reasons it has been rated as exceptional in this area.
“We feel that we’re meeting an employee’s need to give to society and it’s our way of giving back to society, too,” says Vincent Altomonte, associate director of HR at MUHC. “They know they still have their job here and come back happier and with an additional experience.”
Finding ways to make its vacation and time-off package more attractive has taken creative thinking and careful planning, says Altomonte. The Quebec nurse’s union negotiates a single contract with all hospitals in the province. It stipulates everyone must get four weeks’ holiday after the first year.
As Montreal’s largest English-speaking hospital, MUHC has many immigrant employees who were keen to have a longer bereavement leave to accommodate trips back to their home countries, says Altomonte.
MUHC also allows employees to schedule three days off every year for personal reasons. This has taken some of the stress off workers who would otherwise feel like they had to “cheat” to take time off to take care of family matters, he says.
For the past two years, MUHC has also given salaried managers, with more than five years’ service, an additional week off annually.
“A lot of them put in a lot of hours, so we were looking at how we could compensate them and recognize them,” he says.
While the improvements have led to greater retention of staff, initially there was skepticism from senior management.
“There’s always a concern about what it’s going to cost us and, of course, there is a shortage of professional staff that exists in health care. Do you really want to give an additional leave to an employee?” he says.
“We were able to explain to them that, in the long run, it leads to higher employee satisfaction and retention issues. Also, as an employer, with the leave for humanitarian reasons, do you really want to say you’re not going to grant them a leave to go and work in a war-torn country?”
Flexibility — whether in scheduling, granting leaves or improving time off — is a priority for MUHC, he says. However, deciding which initiatives to pursue has been a challenge for the 100-plus HR team who oversees more than 7,000 full- and part-time employees in five teaching hospitals.
“There are so many demands on HR now. We’re in a severe shortage of manpower, especially qualified professionals. The new recruits are very competitive. You have to respond, but you can’t respond to everything,” he says.
MUHC has surveyed other teaching hospitals in the province to see what is offered in terms of benefits. While MUHC does provide more time off for employees, it hasn’t put a figure on the actual cost, in part because many of the initiatives, such as personal days and humanitarian leaves, are a matter of scheduling not budgeting.
“We had to be careful to explain (to management) there wasn’t going to be a budgetary impact, necessarily,” he says. “How did we prove that? That was a little more difficult.”
MUHC uses its bi-annual work climate survey to guide its decision-making, says Altomonte. While HR has designed the strategies, senior management has typically supported them. And while there is no direct correlation between vacation and time-off benefits and the hospital’s bottom line, MUHC is a leader in recruitment in Montreal and had a voluntary turnover rate last year of nine per cent, he says.
“You need to build bridges between these different parties: The higher administration, the managers, the staff. They all have needs,” he says. “What we tried to do is try to think strategically and we tried to use common sense.”
Danielle Harder is a Whitby, Ont.-based freelance writer.
Employer Snapshot
McGill University Health Centre
Head office: Montreal
Number of employees: 5,467 (full-time), 2,066 (part-time)
Number of HR employees: 100
Year company founded: 1999
What company does: MUHC is an academic health institution made up of five teaching hospitals affiliated with the faculty of medicine at McGill University. It provides health-care and trauma emergency services.
Seven-part series
Topic overview and schedule
This is the third part of a seven-part series on best practices. Here’s what’s on deck and what’s been covered:
Dec. 1: The physical workspace at the University of Toronto.
Dec. 15: Employee engagement at Microsoft.
Jan. 26: Community involvement at SaskTel.
Feb. 9: Training and skills development at Sierra Systems.
Feb. 23: Health and family-friendly benefits at TD Bank Financial Group.
March 9: Benefit consultations at Simon Fraser University.
