New cap on annual leave. If you were me, what would you do?

Ms_Shepard

Recently, due to budget cuts, our organization placed a new cap on annual leave. Previously, our cap was 240 hours (30 days). Our new cap is 160 hours (20 days). We have advised our employees to use any annual leave over the new cap by the end of the fiscal year (Sept. 30). We have an employee who has been saving leave for a pending adoption of a foreign child. The adoption was to take place in the spring, and has now been pushed to either summer or fall due to situations in the country they are adopting from. This employee would have 240 hours by mid-summer and wants us to assure her that we can make an exception in her case and let her be exempt from the new cap so she can use her leave for the adoption process and bonding with the new child, should this extend after Sept. 30.

What would you do?

LindaS

Would you extend this leave for any other circumstance? If not, I would not recommend doing it for this one either. Once you make an exception for one, there will be others asking for, what they consider, legitimate reasons as well and then you find yourself making decisions based on what YOU feel is important which can get you into trouble. It's best to stick by the book on this one and tell her "no".

Balloonman

I agree with Linda, however, since this is a recent change, you could work around this one for any leaves your were already aware of. As it stands now, look at your FMLA policy, this individual is entitled to 12 weeks leave with that.
My $0.02 worth.
DJ The Balloonman

PAhr

Although you don't need to allow her the 30 days paid leave, you do have to offer at least 12 weeks unpaid leave under FMLA as adoption and baby bonding time is covered under FMLA.

Leslie

We bought the employess down to 40 hours below the new cap - that's because we accrue the time on a bi-weekly basis. If you only accrue on an annual basis you could just buy the down to the 160 even, and they are responsible to use or lose.

It made everyone happy, and your lady who is saving the time for adoption could just save the dollars to cover her time off. Of course, ours wasn't very expensive, because we were going from no cap to 240. There just weren't that many people over 200 hours.