ForumsEmployee Benefits and Retirement Planning

With 10 statutory employees, federal law doesn't require you to do anything pertaining to employee time off. In what state are you located? With that, I can definitely offer some solid recommendations and reasoning. Will check back later . . .

It is great that your business is growing and you now have full time employees.
How long have you been in this business?? Do you have an Accountant??
Do you have a Business Plan?? Reason I ask (besides being a SCORE Counselor) is that
part of the plan includes just what you are asking. As you said "you need to put something in place"
It is time to set policy for employees that is fair and consistent.
You need a policy for vacation (so many weeks after so many years), sick days, personal days
even holidays and as you said unpaid leave. It should be in writing and all employees get a copy.
Also this is a good time to think about health benefits.
Good luck, LUCKIEST

You do have specific obligations relative to rehiring an employee returning from military duty, and this is the only federal employment law that applies to virtually every employer in the country regardless of the size or type of organization (corporate, non-profit, government). For details regarding employer requirements:
http://www.dol.gov/elaws/vets/userra/userra.asp

I have two full time employees and many part timers. I found that the easiest for me to keep track of sick time used is to give them a ETO (earned time off) bank. For each hour that they wrok in a week, they earn ETO, which they can save up and use for sick rime, personal time or vacation. I usea formula of 0.04 hours of credit per hour worked. This works out to 80 hours of time off per year. I do pay for holidays instead of them using their ETO. If your employees are salaried, you can use a similar formula based on a weekly rate.

So my answer is to determine how much timeoff that you want to pay for and then work backwards by determining how much that correlates per hour or week and credit your people that much with each pay period.

The nice thing about this is that you don't have to say you only have this much sick time or vacation time. It is up to them to keep track of how they want to spend it and how much they can earn.

Don't forget to have a booklet or handout when you hire someone specifying leave, time off, holidays etc. You can also post these on a bulletin board.

I concur with puzzleman completely (as does one of the nation's leading employment attorneys).

Have only one "flavor" of time off. Don't categorize it as sick leave, vacation, comp time, etc. -- just Earned Time Off -- working backward from your budget objectives as suggested to determine how much to offer.

By the way, she (the attorney) wants me to tell you not to let people borrow unearned time off. If they haven't earned it and miss work, then they're off without pay regardless of the circumstances.

I'm changing to a similar process having 5 FT employees. The "old way" was cumbersome and often inaccurate managed by a former ofc manager.

In addition to earning 9 hr/month, I also threw in a paid birthday off. ETO will increase to 12 hr/month after 3 yrs of service. Since they often do so much outside of their job descriptions, I felt it was a fair way to reward their service.

How is your new ETO process working??