Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
A California Employer Advisor reader asks: Our company policy gives employees their actual birthday off with pay. A birthday that falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or holiday will be taken on the preceding or following workday. Subject to a supervisor’s approval, employees may take another day off, but it must be within one week of […]
You’re worried about having to lay people off. You’re worried about the economy and poor profits. You’re worried about employee morale. You’re worried about the effect of being worried all the time. You’re not alone.
An employee comes to you asking to take time off to meet with school officials because his child was suspended. Do you have to grant the request? What about for jury duty, or because the employee witnessed a crime? Are you required to permit employees time off to vote? In addition to the big leave […]
Jeffery Akers was a patent examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). He sought a promotion but didn’t get it. Instead, a younger woman was given the position. Akers believed that his age and gender prevented him from getting the promotion, so he filed a discrimination charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission […]
In every issue, we take one reader’s question and ask our other readers to weigh in. Here’s what you had to say about a recent question:
We thought managing PTO was going to be easy, but we’ve found some problems with carryover of PTO hours. We currently allow unlimited carryover, but that’s going to cause some problems down the road (like three-month vacations). So we’d like to limit carryover. Is there a carryover rule? We really want to force employees to […]
We’ve been struggling with keeping production up because of employee vacations. So instead of trying to fight vacation schedules, we want to start shutting down for a week in December and again in July and making everyone take vacation during those weeks. Are there any laws about doing this or any problems that you foresee? […]
We’ve had a string of sad situations recently that have really tested our bereavement leave policy. We currently offer three days off for the death of an employee’s immediate family member. One situation involved the death of a family member on the East Coast, for which our employee wanted five days of bereavement leave. Another […]
We’ve got a situation around our PTO (Paid Time Off) program. When we first initiated it, people liked it, and we thought that the very clear policy—exceed your accrued PTO days and you won’t get paid for any additional time off—would work well. We figured employees would hoard their days, and that we’d only have […]