In 2022, Colorado began observing Juneteenth as an official Colorado state holiday. In response, the University of Colorado implemented a Personal Observance Day (POD) to facilitate the implementation of this holiday as soon as possible without disrupting existing academic calendars.

The Personal Observance Day is one day of leave offered each fiscal year to leave-eligible employees. It may be used on the Juneteenth holiday itself (observed on June 19 or the nearest weekday when that date falls on the weekend) or any day chosen by the employee and approved by their supervisor.

Supervisors and payroll liaisons are asked to ensure that vacation leave-eligible employees know they have this leave day available and that they only use it once per fiscal year.

Please check each employee’s leave history when they request POD leave to ensure they haven’t used their allotted POD leave earlier in the fiscal year.

This leave is only available to employees who are already eligible to earn vacation leave and who are hired on or before June 30 within a given fiscal year. Employees who leave the university at any time during the year must request and use the personal observance day before they depart. The value of earnings for this leave day will not be paid out to them if they don’t use it. (There's one exception: Classified staff who are not able to take the designated holiday off may choose to be paid time and a half their base salary hourly rate or can move their holiday to use at a different date. Any holiday that is not taken or paid at time and half by the end of the fiscal year is required to be paid out at the base hourly rate.)

A new Personal Observance Day is available to employees on July 1 each year.

The leave category is marked Personal Observance Day in HCM, and a query report exists to monitor the use of this leave category. Here’s where to find it:

1. Log into the employee portal.
2. Open the CU Resources dropdown menu and click Business Tools.
3. Select the HCM tile and choose HCM Community Users from the drop-down menu.
4. Click the HCM WorkCenter tile.
5. Select the Resources tab, select Query Manager and search for CUES_HCM_POD_LEAVE.