Good for you (and the widow)! You played that game quite well I must say.
In my experience, the first few days (even if it was a foreshadowed death) are spent in shock; it is also possible that some relatives won’t be able to come until the days she’s asked for.
Also, lots of the paperwork which needs to be filed will take several weeks to prepare; it is often a legal requirement to do so, and only possible during normal office hours (or even reduced ones, many government offices in many countries work only mornings).
When the mother of the live-in girlfriend of a coworker died, the coworker asked for permission to miss a few hours, to be comped later (i.e., he’d leave work for three hours to attend the funeral, then come back, and “owe” the time; comping time was a pretty common mechanism). Spanish law establishes that bereavement does cover in-laws but it doesn’t mention intended-in-laws and the company didn’t have a specific policy, but it seemed mean to deny the request so the factory manager asked the country manager what to do. The country manager laughed heartily and said “you know X and Y, from Sales?” “Yeah?” “They’ve been living together for at least five years, and I don’t mean as flatmates. You think I’d deny bereavement to one of them just because they can’t marry?”
My coworker’s situation wasn’t quite the same, as it was legal for him and his gf to marry (they were following current custom of not doing it until you’re going to try for a kid) and it wasn’t legal for the two guys from Sales, but he got the three hours and didn’t need to comp them.
Not the anniversary of the funerals, but the anniversary of my father’s and my grandmother’s deaths are two days I’ll go to Mass even if I’m in a place where I know I won’t understand a word. It’s been 12 years for him, 17 for her.
Wow. I’m glad I don’t work for the OP.
Doesn’t your employee manual say something specific about which relatives’ deaths trigger eligibility for bereavement leave?
Because, you know, if someone’s spouse, parent, child, or sibling dies, the term ‘taking advantage’ of three paid days of bereavement leave really doesn’t apply in any meaningful way.
Now if your employees can get bereavement leave when their second cousin once removed kicks the bucket, the policy might be open to considerable abuse. But your company should deal with that by defining the circle of relatives that the policy applies to in a way that it feels is appropriate.
I misread the request as being for “two more days a month from now on” and wondered why nobody thought it was nuts. Oops.
I’ll admit, I did this as well…
My company has 100 people, and gives 3 days paid bereavement (I imagine that smaller companies in general have less generous bereavement policies but more flexibility overall), and there has to be manager or HR approval (which is really a formality). I am not going to post the full policy.
There’s nothing about consecutive days, but I am pretty much certain (knowing the HR people) that the person in the OP would get all three days in the circumstances described.
I’ve never heard of anyone abusing the policy – the opposite, in fact. When my grandfather died, his funeral was over a holiday weekend, so I didn’t even ask about taking bereavement to attend his funeral.
Give her the three days. I won’t say you need to give five like others have said. I work for a small company, I understand that it doesn’t work like that. But part of what’s lovely about working for a small company is the flexibility and the personal touch, and that’s why you need to give them to her. Well that, and she’s just lost her husband, for goodness sake. That takes… more than a month to get over, even if it was expected.
My company has about 30,000 employees. The following is the written bereavement policy:
When my mother died suddenly everyone was shocked that I chose to return to work after the 3 days of leave.
StG
I definitely agree with the consensus here that this employee should get her time off.
If there isn’t going to be a funeral, I would not be surprised if the employee is having her husband cremated and then having a memorial service for him next month when everyone can gather.
Often grieving people feel worse after a little time has passed because after the initial hoopla over the funeral everyone else has gone back to their normal life. For that reason, I can definitely see how it could be helpful to someone who is truly grieving to get some kind of respite after time has passed anyway.
You guys are all lucky ducks - where I work if somebody dies you take off and then submit a begging request. For some reason they approved two days when my grandpa died (the rest in vacation time) and three for Grandma. Five? FIVE? HAHAHAHA.
We do get a reasonable amount of leave generally speaking, though.
Guilty as charged.
Nevermind; I read the original request as being for two days a month from now on, as well.
And 3 days is 3 days, doesn’t matter when it is.
Come on now folks. Do you guys actually think that’s what the employee wanted/asked for? Yeah, I guess anything is possible but what does common sense and probability tell you?
now watch as this is the one in a hundred case where common sense is wrong and I look like a dweeb yet again
Another vote for you’re over thinking this.
Even if she was planning to use those 2 days to go to Vegas, shoot up heroin, and get married to the first man she sleeps with, you have no way of knowing any of this unless you hire a private detective to spy on her–the cost of which will probably way exceed her pay on those days anyways.
There’s not any question that her husband died, right? Unless there is a statute of limitations spelled out in the leave policy, let her have her measly two days off and think no more about it. The bad precedence that you think this is going to set? It ain’t going to happen because most people will take their 3 freebies immediately. This is obviously a different kind of situation, and not being sensitive to that is exactly what a manager should not do if they want to be respected.
Are staff regularly abusing privileges in your office? In my experience, when management seems more concerned about staff abusing policies than they are about giving them the benefit of the doubt, there is something very wrong in the organization. Either the employees don’t give a damn and are acting out, or management are straight up fascists. Or some combo of both.
Lets assume you have an employee. Over their career the following happens.
The spouse dies.
Both parents die.
Both in-laws die.
3 kids die.
2 grandparents die.
2 in-law grandparents die.
2 Siblings die.
And hell, lets throw in these.
2 aunts/uncles die
2 in-law aunts/uncles/grandparents die.
That’s 18 dead “close” relatives.
Lets assume all this tragedy happens over a 20 year time frame. So, lets round up and call it 20 deaths over 20 years and you give 3 days per death. Though in reality it’s probably a half to a third of that.
So thats a whopping 3 death days off per year per employee. OMG thats going to bankrupt the company or cause it to cease to function!
3 days out of well over 200 working days per year.
If a cost increase 1.5 percent would run you out of business your business is already on the raged edge and any major cost increase is going to frack you up at some point. Or, if all your employees would leave over a 1.5 percent pay difference for “nice compassionate employer vs cute throat penny pinching employer” then you ain’t running a shop any employee gives a crap about staying at in the first place and they are probably working as hard for you as you care about them in the first place which is certainly well less than 98.5 percent of what they are capable of.
How many of your employee do you expect to have experiences like this and how often? This isn’t even the type of thing you can put a dollar on even from a business cost perspective no matter what type of spreadsheet and charts somebody makes up. It is all bullshit.
You never said what type of job your employees do but you can’t run businesses where all employees are 100% efficient and busy all of the time. That means one of two things: People either have their own work that they can catch up on later or even do in advance and that costs the business nothing or other employees can work a little harder to cover such situations which again means the business loses nothing. If most of your other employers don’t want to cover for someone that loses a spouse you have much bigger than just your own management style as you portray yourself in this thread.
You need to take a long hard look at your priorities because something is wrong and that is what most people here are trying to tell you.
I have worked lots of megacorps and consulted on the HR side. I have seen people with attitudes and beliefs like yours before but it is never a good thing for even themselves in the long run let alone the business that they supposedly care most about as priority #1 over everything else. To put it bluntly, you are supposed to use your good judgement and actually manage through a holistic approach to everything involved, not pretend to be a contract lawyer obsessed with the minutia of wording in employee manuals.
I’m probably opening myself up to all the hate that’s coming down on you, but I’m going to be on your side on this one.
Did she ALREADY request vacation time for the 4th, and now she’s trying to save her vacation by saying you still owe her the bereavement time? Because I don’t know if that would be a good precedent to set. However, (like everyone else), if it’s time that she planned to spend with her kids only after the death of her husband, then yes, I believe 30 days is a perfectly reasonable time span. (Note: I would not be okay with this if she just wanted to take 3 day weekends for the rest of the month, but that’s obviously not the case.)
So many people are calling you harsh, but in a small company, word does get around. Other people WILL know about it. And there are people out there who are big enough dicks to take advantage of something like a death in the family.
For what it’s worth: my company offers three days for immediate family or any person who lives with you. It does not state that the days must be consecutive. My office has always been great about not only bereavement leave, but granting a reasonable amount of unpaid time for the death of anyone that you know who has passed away.
IMO the word getting around the boss is cheapskate is much worse than the word getting around that Sally from accounting abused the system somehow and got away with it. In the first case the employees mostly hate the company. In the second case the employees mostly hate Sally.
I think your reading is right. But the most that will get around will be, if your spouse dies, you get to change vacation time to bereavement leave. Yay! Let us all hope our spouses die!
Not gonna happen. Especially in a company with 30 employees, where people are more likely to know each other’s business.
Even if this is the case, and she’s changing vacation time to bereavement time, so what? Then she can use those vacation days later, for things like the anniversary of their first date or something, or just for time off because really she’s going to need it. 3 days for the loss of a spouse - even a long-term ill spouse - is nothing.
If she didn’t initially request the time off then it was probably because she didn’t fully appreciate the loss. It’s not like grief arrives like a bomb, breaks things up in visible ways and is then gone - it’s more like a slow-acting poison.
If she didn’t already have vacation time booked for that weekend, then it might not just be her going ‘yay, I can use my spouse’s death for paid time off work!’ The Fourth of July weekend, shortly after the death of her spouse, would be when a lot of family members already have booked time off work (or kids are off school), so it makes it more feasible for them to come down to see her, necessitating her time off work at that period for actual, genuine, grief-related activities. It’d be a really handy time for them all to get together and toast to the memory of Uncle John, or whoever.
OP, if you posted this because you have concerns about your employee’s attendance or work otherwise and have reason to suspect she might abuse the system, or encourage others to, this still is a subject where you have to be compassionate. It will only make you look like a bad person otherwise.
What sort of inhuman corporate bastard are you? It should be obvious to anyone with an iota of compassion that even if she knew her husband was dying, that she should get more than the single day of bereavement leave. You don’t know the circumstances- maybe that’s when the family’s getting together to grieve or remember the husband. Ultimately it’s none of your fucking business either.
It doesn’t cost you a damn thing, and honestly you should be ashamed. You should know better than to even ask such a thing; if there’s doubt, the compassionate thing is to give the days as bereavement, especially if your company is equally stingy with the vacation days.
It’s this kind of corporate nickel-and-diming that drives me up the wall. Employees are people, with all the concerns, successes, failures, happy moments and sad moments. Jerking them around about their major life milestones on account of a few hours here or there, or the odd vacation day is just the most assholish thing that I can imagine, and yet it’s all too common.