The Essential Guide to Family & Medical Leave

chapter 6 | how much leave can an employee tAke? | 105
leave time. This is true even if your company does not require the
employee to work on leave, but the employee voluntarily does it anyway.
So, be sure that employees on FMLA leave are not working—follow up
with their managers and supervisors to make sure they understand the
rule and that they tell employees not to work on leave.
• Extra time taken off at your request isn’t FMLA leave. If your company gets
an employee’s agreement to take off more time than he or she actually
needs—for example, if an employee agrees to take a full day rather than
a couple hours so that you can hire a temporary employee to perform the
employee’s duties for the day—you can’t count the difference between
the time off and the time actually needed against the employee’s FMLA
leave entitlement. These extra hours were a convenience to you and can’t
be held against the employee.
EXAMPLE: Hal usually works an eight-hour schedule five days a week. Hal requests
three hours off every Tuesday to care for his sick father. You instruct Hal to take all
of Tuesday off, so that your company can put a different employee into his original
schedule. You log Hal’s eight hours off as FMLA leave. Was this correct?
Nope. Only the three hours off that Hal needed can be counted as FMLA leave
time. The other five hours may be designated as paid time off or other leave under
your company’s policies but do not reduce Hal’s available FMLA leave time.
• Holidays don’t affect the count. All actual workweeks are counted; it
doesn’t matter that a holiday falls within one of the weeks that an
employee is out on FMLA leave.
• If the company is closed for at least a week, that time doesn’t count as FMLA
leave. If your company shuts down operations entirely and employees
are not required to come to work for a week or more, that week will not
count as one of the employee’s FMLA leave workweeks. For example, a
company that closes its doors for two weeks in August can’t count those
weeks as FMLA leave for any employee.