Should Bosses Care How Employees Use Paid Time Off?

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Alan,
If an employee is non-exempt, federal law requires that they be paid by the hour. You couldn't pay someone for 40 hours worth of pay and have them only work 36 hours, because what you are doing is changing their hourly rate. That would be fine until the next week when they work 40 hours. You can't pay them the same amount you paid them the previous week, as they only worked 36 hours.
For exempt level employees it should be all about the job getting done, and not the hours worked.

Suzanne Lucas 8:52AM February 12, 2010

Maybe a better measure of the employee is what their work product is rather the amount of time they spend getting it done. The employer doesn't seem to mind that they take a few hours off every week. If their work is getting done why insist on 40 hours/week? Rather than discussing PTO they should discuss business measures to be accomplished. If its getting done in 20 hours per week, or 60, then its time to renegotiate. If its 35 or 45 then its likely to even itself out over time.

Alan of MD 9:51PM February 11, 2010

Brilliant as Suzanne always is.
It also seems like the questioner is annoyed by the behavior without knowing exactly why. I'd echo Suzanne that you need to figure out what the issue really is -- are you just annoyed that they're not doing things the way you'd envisioned? Okay, yeah, they're not getting advance permission and it's technically a violation of your rules, but what's the real impact of that in this case? You want to make sure that there's a real reason to take issue with what they're doing. And there very well may be (in fact, I think there probably is, for the reasons Suzanne wrote) -- but you want to be really clear on exactly what your objection is and whether it's legitimate before you decide how to address this.

Alison Green / Ask a Manager of DC 1:59PM February 11, 2010