Employers may explicitly provide a limited number of days that can be taken off with pay when situations arise in which an employee can't reasonably make it to work even though he or she isn't ill or on vacation. While personal time is usually treated as paid time off, as a small employer you may choose not to pay your employees. Instead, you may decide to treat personal time off as an excused absence.

Paid time off. If you choose to provide paid personal time off, you may want to avoid classifying each type of paid leave that may be taken and, instead, provide employees with a set number of days that may be taken off for any reason. Under these paid time off plans, employees need not explain why they aren't going to come to work on a particular day. Thus, there are no vacation days, sick days, or personal days, just paid time away from work.

This type of plan is easy to administer, since you don't have to track different types of absences for payroll purposes. However, you must communicate to your employees the terms and conditions that are imposed on the use and scheduling of paid time off. And, remember that you're placing responsibility for managing the time off on the employees. That might not be appropriate for all situations.

Here are some sample leave or time off policies, including a personal time off policy and a funeral leave policy.

Bereavement leave. Some employers have informal or formal policies that permit employees to take funeral or bereavement leave. Others merely treat the time taken off after a death in the family as vacation time or paid time off.

If you decide to offer funeral leave as a benefit, create a written policy to communicate the following to your employees:

• how much time can be taken off (which you may vary depending on circumstances, such as the location of funeral services)
• whether the employee will be paid for the time off
• the relatives whose death will trigger application of the policy

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