To develop or not to develop a General LOA policy -- any insights would be appreciated

noodleman

Due to abuse, we have discontinued our policy of granting general leaves of absence. We have adopted the position that, paid time off, holidays, excusable absences and FMLA etc. provide employees with enough time off that having a general LOA policy only encourages more excused absenteeism. Aprox. half our production workforce is made up of people from a number of different nationalities. I'm constantly running into problems with employees who want to take extended time off to visit their country and want LOA time to do it. Our policy in the past has been that, if departmental schedules and needs allow it, we would grant the leave. For the past couple years, I've been requiring people who want extended absences to accumulate PTO and attendance bonus time (as much as 40 PTO hours per year in addition to the normal accrual) for these extended absences and allowed them to take the PTO all at once with departmental approval. A couple people have saved up their PTO and used this option. I've required employees without enough PTO and/or attendance bonus conversion to resign and re-apply when they return, hiring them back ONLY if we have available positions. Does this sound reasonable? How many out there have separate LOA policies (in addition to FMLA, etc.) and how do they work? Are there some of you who , like us, don't have separate LOA policies?

LindaS

The company I currently work for allows leaves of absence for reasons that do not fall under and federal or state laws to be granted on a case by case basis only AFTER all vacation or other paid leave is used up. An example of this would be a new employee wanting to go to a funeral for a relative. It is amazing how many of these "emergencies" are redefined after we tell them they have to use any vacation time first.

I used to work for a company that had quite a few individuals from other nationalities who wanted to go back to their countries for visits, etc.. Out stand on that was that if the person did not have enough vacation time and the reason was not FMLA qualifying, we did not allow it. I know it may sound harsh but it was not fair to the other workers to allow certain people to be off for several weeks for what amounted to a "vacation" and not allow others.

There was one situation at my previous employer where the employee actually went out and purchased the airline tickets before notifying us that he wanted to take a leave. When he put in his request and we denied it, he showed us the tickets and expected us to grant the leave based on the fact that the tickets were non-refundable. We again denied his request and he ended up resigning.

With regard to new employees needing time off we followed the policy wherein the employee had to provide documentation proving that the reservations, etc. were purchased before they were hired and if so, we granted a one-time leave.

Hope this helps.

Gillian

This is one where you need to evaluate the costs of providing the leave, versus the cost of not doing so. There are costs to not being flexible - increased turnover because employees would prefer to work for someone who is more flexible, morale issues because you may be viewed as an inflexible employer with little concern about employee family needs, etc. That said, it is tough in some environments to have a lot of employees who are absent, so you need to limit it somehow. How about allowing one LOA to go back to the home country once every two or three years?

With all due respect to Linda, it is not good to force people to cancel vacations or time off that they have already paid for, regardless of whether or not the employer was told. It would have been better to have said - don't do that again. My predecessor had a habit of doing this and the animosity towards HR and the employer was unbelievable.