Common Questions and Answers About Vacation Time

These days, many of us are just an email, text, or click away from work. So it’s more important than ever to make sure you and your employees are getting time away to recharge. That being said, many business owners and HR staff have concerns about certain vacation or paid time off (PTO) policies. Here are three common questions and answers about vacation time.

Q: Can we deny an employee’s use of accrued vacation time?

A: Yes, the decision to approve or deny the use of accrued vacation time is up to you, assuming you do so in a consistent and non-discriminatory manner. It would be acceptable, for example, to deny a vacation request because approving it would leave you without adequate coverage, or because the employee asked with less notice than is required by your time off policy.

You should, however, ensure that certain employees are not denied vacation disproportionately. For instance, if an employer’s admin staff (who are all women), or their software engineers (who are all men), are consistently denied vacation because arranging coverage is difficult and deadlines are abundant, this could lead to claims of discrimination.

Q: Can we give employees different amounts of vacation or PTO time?

A: If the differing amounts of vacation or PTO are based on a clearly-defined employee groupings, such as seniority, department, or exempt versus non-exempt status, then yes. It’s a common practice, for example, for employers to offer more vacation time to employees who have been with the organization for longer.

Where you can run into trouble is offering different amounts of vacation on an individual basis or without clearly-defined criteria, either of which can lead to discrimination claims. For instance, if Rafik and Anita are hired at the same time for similar jobs in the accounting department at the same rate of pay, but the organization offers Rafik more vacation, Anita could potentially bring a claim under federal or state discrimination or pay equity laws.

Q: A non-exempt employee has asked to be paid for the hour she spent checking work email while she was out on vacation. We didn’t request, require, or authorize this work. How do we handle this?

A: Although you didn’t give this non-exempt employee permission to check her work email while she was on vacation, you will need to pay her for the time she worked. In this case, the employee checked e-mail for one hour of her vacation day, so you would provide one hour of regular pay and charge the rest of her day to her vacation bank.

To prevent this kind of thing from occurring in the future, it is perfectly permissible to create and enforce a policy stating that employees are not permitted to perform work (including checking e-mails and voicemails) while on vacation or taking any other kind of paid or unpaid leave. While you can’t withhold pay for time worked, you can hold employees accountable to the policy by disciplining for any violation.

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