https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-were-introducing-climate-leave-paid-time-off-extreme-anil-dash/
[Quantifying another impact of climate change on the world economy. Not
just after the fact, but explicitly making allowance for it in advance.
Do people really still think that mitigation is more expensive than the
consequences?
I hope the next step is to allow employees to use this time for climate
mitigation activities, not just recovering from consequences. E.g.,
home weather-sealing and insulation upgrades; acquiring an electric car
to replace a fossil-fueller; leading related community efforts such as
community gardens, making biofuels from waste products, setting up
car-pooling or telecommuting ...
video in on-line article]
Why we’re introducing Climate Leave: paid time off for extreme weather
disruptions
Published on November 8, 2017
The short version: At Fog Creek, workers get paid time off if they are
impacted by the increasingly frequent disruptions of extreme weather and
environmental conditions due to climate change. We hope other companies
will join us.
Five years ago, we had a real wake-up call at our little company, Fog
Creek Software. We’re headquartered in downtown Manhattan, and though
most of our team is remote now, back then almost everybody was based
right in New York City.
Superstorm Sandy hit us with full force in October of 2012. You probably
know the broad details about Sandy, but our particular story was pretty
unusual — our data center in downtown Manhattan was cut off from fuel,
and keeping our customers running required days of heroics that
culminated in a multi-company bucket brigade effort to carry generator
fuel up 18 stories. Our team helped keep the lights on, and even took
part in a short documentary film that was inspired by the episode.
It’s a striking story, but more important was the fact that much of our
team was displaced, and many people had to evacuate—often bringing
family, friends or pets along with them. We were reminded of those
hardships as members of our team were forced from their homes again by
the recent series of hurricanes that have ravaged parts of America.
While there were of course far worse victims of these storms, and we’re
extremely thankful that none of our colleagues were injured, it’s still
incredibly important to us that Fog Creek be a company that supports its
employees when they need us most. Investment in our people is the
fundamental founding principle of our company.
Putting it in writing
What we found during the recent storms (and were reminded of as we
warily watched the spate of wildfires that have caused so much
destruction lately) was that, when our team members were forced to
evacuate, we didn’t have a policy to support them. Now, of course, we
did the right thing — we told our coworkers to get safe, take the time
they need, and don’t worry about work while they’re putting family
first. But as a CEO, I never want to be having to tell an employee,
“trust me, it’ll be okay”, because taking care of employees means
putting down our commitments to them and their families — in writing.
This is especially important because these situations of being displaced
by weather or environmental conditions are only going to become more
common. As a company, we’re already 17 years old, and we want to be
around for many, many years to come, so we look carefully at official
reports that explain we’ll see increasingly violent storms and
increasingly destructive wildfires. The simple conclusion is that if
we’re not committing to taking care of our employees during extreme
weather events, we’re not fulfilling our responsibilities to our team.
Our past policy of “trust us, we’ll take care of you” needs to be
formalized for the same reasons that any other HR policy gets
formalized: having it in writing protects workers.
Policy in practice
Once we made the decision to enact this policy, implementing it was
relatively straightforward. We followed a few simple steps:
Our proposed policy is that employees can take up to 5 days of
climate leave due to extreme weather each calendar year, and that any
leave of greater than 5 consecutive days requires there to be a declared
state of extended emergency, as determined by local officials in the
employee’s region. This policy directly mirrors our policy of unlimited
sick leave, with any absence of more than 5 days becoming short
term-disability and requiring a doctor’s note.
The proposed policy was drafted by me as CEO, in consultation with
our COO, finance and culture leaders, and presented to the entire
company for review and comment. (Any policy change that affects
compensation or employment agreements goes through our feedback cycle,
where anyone in the company can offer revisions or ask for
clarifications.) We did an advance briefing with team leads so they
would know the broad outlines and be able to handle any basic questions
that arose from their team members if needed.
We looked at the payroll and compensation tracking systems we use,
as well as others on the market, and found that none offered explicit
climate or weather leave (if you see a system that does track these
things, let everybody know!) and decided to manually track any climate
leave that’s used. Given that our team is still small and individual
members are still relatively unlikely to be affected in any given year,
we think this will be sustainable for our purposes for quite a while.
We’re planning to watch how the policy is used (and hopefully learn
from examples of how similar policies are deployed at other companies)
and iterate over time.
And of course, we’re working to do our part to reduce our impact on
the climate as a company, as well. For example, our policy of being
remote-first while paying for mass transit for employees in our NYC
headquarters means that, in a typical week, there are zero car commutes
for our employees. We’ll be evaluating more of our business processes to
see how we can make substantive improvements in the future.
If you’ve got questions about how we’re implementing our Climate Leave
policy, or examples that we can learn from of how other companies are
addressing similar concerns, please do share. And yes, Fog Creek is
hiring—and our human-centric policies go far beyond just our support for
climate leave.
