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Funeral Leave

GLCGLC 174 Posts
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Our president's wife died a few days ago. Our bereavement leave obviously does not cover for an employee's wife. However, I know many of our employees will want to attend the funeral which is during the workday because so many of our employees knew her. I am inclined to just let employees include it as work time. Have any of you ever encountered this? If not, how would you handle it?
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  • 5 Comments sorted by Votes Date Added
  • Dutch2Dutch2 1,590 Posts
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    Thankfully where I have been for the past 10 years we have not had a death hit so close to home. However, in a previous life, we allowed what you mentioned when the death was a co-worker or the spouse or child of a co-worker. We allowed anyone that felt close to the departed or the surviving co-worker to attend the local funeral, if they wanted to do so, and we keep them on the clock. Of course we first had to ensure that the work area/office was still staffed enough to cover operations during the time of the funeral.
    In other situations where the death has been a friend or someone else not covered by our bereavement plan, we do our best to allow them to attend the funeral but without pay.
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  • IrieIrie 482 Posts
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    Last year one of our employees passed away. We allowed employees to use PTO to attend the memorial service.
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  • SMaceSMace 1,481 Posts
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    You have the prime opportunity to royally screw this up. So please be careful. You could piss off the president and every employee with one fell swoop.

    The "nice" thing to do would be to pay everyone for time missed. You could cap the amount(some want to go home and change and live farther away, etc).

    Keep in mind whatever you do will be looked at in the future.

    Our policy for bereavement leave for a non-family member is to allow the time off unpaid for non-exempt and paid for exempt. We would allow the non-exempt to make up the time if they can. In this situation I'm not sure what we would do. It depends.
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  • NeedCoffeeNeedCoffee 595 Posts
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    We had this same situation happen a few months ago. We decided it was in our best interest to allow anyone who felt close to the departed to go to the services, but each department was responsible for ensuring adequate staffing. This meant that some people "took turns" going to services. It's not an ideal situation, but we still had a business to run!
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  • BettyBoop FLBettyBoop FL 44 Posts
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    We have had similar situations in the past years where an employee passed. We allowed anyone who was close to the employee & wanted to attend services, paid time off. However they left from the office & returned after service if time permitted.
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