How does my employer benefit from accruing vacation for long-standing employees?

At my company we accrue vacation days per month.

This sounds a bit unusual to me. Usually it's weekly or resetting within a period of time usually at the FY start.

This means I will never be able to take a week off early in the year. I've been with the company for 3 years now, and my boss has no problem with it.

I'm thinking you might want to check your local, city, or state laws in regard to time off. If you cannot take vacations longer than a week in the early part of the year, then that sounds horrible.

I am curious, how does my employer benefit from vacation accrual for long time employees?

The thing is when you have vacation hours, that's considered "earned" hours. So if you have 80 hours of vacation, that's 80 hours that they have to pay you. Only way they can not pay that is if you get fired or don't put in a notice period.

However.... I think this isn't what you're asking. You're asking how your employer benefits within the current scheme that you fall under. You ear hours on a monthly basis so that means you have to wait a very long time to save up your vacation time. This sounds like a cheap way to discourage employees from taking any time off or extended time off. This means you can only take a day off here and there or otherwise you're going to run into issues where you cannot even do that.

My thought is the vacation scheme sounds horrible. As I said earlier you best check your local laws and see if there is anything in regard to this. My guess is not so your next best thing is to quit if you can't take necessary time off except at the end of the year.

This sounds like a dumb policy on the company's end, I would recommend leaving some feedback about it to have them potentially review.

However to me it seems that it may be intentional; While not mentioned in this specific question, it would be suspicious to me if they also had expiration dates/times on your PTO in addition to making you wait to accrue it.

If so, the motivation would likely be to make it difficult for employees to fully use their PTO, making them theoretically more productive/available, while also reducing company costs in the event that PTO accrues and doesn't get used, which in many states they have to pay out to an employee when they leave.

If it doesn't expire and they merely make you wait to accrue it, it may just be a poorly thought out policy, or that they are sticking to it for 'legal' reasons while silently acknowledging that you can work out whatever unofficial plan with your own manager that you're both comfortable with.

My question would be how this escalated to HR - Did you submit a request to your boss, and they 'told' you that HR had a problem with it, but that they didn't? This may just be a soft way of your boss denying your request without having to confront you about taking too much time off / too soon / it just not being convenient for them, and scapegoating HR for it with what is an easily defendable excuse that it's a policy.

The reason I mention that is in most of my jobs, whether I take PTO is usually only discussed between me and my manager - it may get reported onto a timesheet system that they use for tracking, but I can't imagine HR getting involved unless there was some dispute over my manager rejecting the request arbitrarily and me complaining

Something that may add some context to what the company may be driving at, which partially makes up my cynicism here, is other PTO scams / schemes, such as:

• "unlimited PTO" where employees don't "Earn" PTO but have to ask for it and are pressured out of using it
• PTO days that are earned but expire
• complicated approval processes for PTO
• blackout windows

etc.