I was thinking that things like parental leave and bereavement leave generally don't happen during the same era of your life. Why couldn't they fall into a more generalized category of leave?
Unless your parents were heavy smokers, and you are the youngest of many siblings, you're probably going to take parental leave for all your kids before taking bereavement leave for either parent. If you base the leave on some kind of verifiable qualifying event, the accounting would probably be satisfied by the company paying premiums to an insurer. So you could give people time off whenever they are likely to be very distracted from work.
It doesn't just have to be because a crying baby is making an ordinary sleep schedule impossible. Jury duty with sequestration could be distracting. A tornado or house fire might be a bit stressful. Having your car totaled might be worth a few days off to sort out the crisis during regular business hours.
I'm not really very personally invested in parental leave any more, now that I think maybe I won't have to change any more diapers until the first grandchild. But I can think of all kinds of hypothetical circumstances beyond my direct control that might cause me to take some PTO here and there, which can easily chisel away the amount of actual vacation I can take, until I'm down to maybe extending a 3-day [holiday] weekend into 5 consecutive days away from work, and then not getting sick for the next 3 months.
That's not the kind of leave that reverses burnout.
Alternately, maybe just flush the PTO experiment into the toilet of history, reinstitute sick leave and true vacation, and give people enough of each that they can absorb those life events that eventually happen to everyone.
> Alternately, maybe just flush the PTO experiment into the toilet of history, reinstitute sick leave and true vacation, and give people enough of each that they can absorb those life events that eventually happen to everyone.
This is what I propose, although you say it more eloquently. Rather than trying to carve out cases, why not offer x months of time off for every y unit of time? Those who want to spend that time with their kids can do that. Why should I remain chained to my desk because that's not what I want to do?
