Employees can now convert their PTO into other benefits

What if instead of losing hundreds of dollars in unused paid time off, employees were able to repurpose it?

In 2020, employees left 33% of their paid time off unused, according to the U.S. Travel Association. In an effort to provide a solution to a multimillion-dollar problem, founder and CEO Rob Whalen launched PTO Exchange in 2017, a virtual platform that gives employees more options when it comes to cashing in their leftover vacation hours.

Through PTO Exchange, employees can use leftover PTO to address other areas of concern, like putting the cash value toward retirement funds or student loans. Workers can even offer extra sick days to a co-worker with less instead of letting that money go to waste.

“The sad thing about it is that [money] goes back into the shareholders' pockets because that's productivity that wasn't utilized,” Whalen says. “We’re allowing employees to use this accrued productivity in the ways that they need, whether that be student loans, emergency savings or 401(K)s.”

Read More: Should the U.S. be taking notes from Europe when it comes to PTO?

While employees have always left paid time off on the table, the shift to virtual work has only worsened this issue. Since March of 2020, an overwhelming majority of Americans have shortened, postponed or canceled their planned time off, according to a study conducted by financial insight blog, IPX.

But employees are more in need than ever for time away, as remote work has increased their work hours and thinned the boundary between work and life. Employees are also feeling the strain of other financial responsibilities that are taking precedence over that yearly vacation, Whalen says.

“Requesting PTO has gone down because of changing needs,” Whalen says. “For example, for someone who has just graduated college, student loan repayment is more important [than PTO], so customers would come to us with a lot of paid time off they want to remove, but don't want to take.”

Read More: Shutting it down

As the concept of PTO changes, according to Whalen, PTO policies need to change with it. While some employers have allowed more roll-over or increased flexibility on what employees could use their PTO time for, it still hasn’t fixed the overarching problem of accounting for those unused days, Whalen says.

PTO Exchange allows employers to set limits on how much time can be converted, and give employees options for how to use it. This gives employers some control, yet allows employees to ensure that their time truly works for their needs, be it their social well-being, their financial well-being or their mental well-being.

“This is a broken system and it needs to be fixed,” Whalen says. “PTO should be owned by the employee, it shouldn't be something that sits on the books of corporations — employees should be able to self-direct it in a way that benefits them.”