Re Miranda’s question above, I have a similar question, only to do with with a non-exempt employee. This person has often put an hour or an hour and a half down as Sick Leave, then went ahead and worked 8 or 9 hours that day, so we ended up paying her for from 9 to 10.5 hours, although the additional hours were at the regular pay rate, rather than the overtime rate. Do we have to (or can we) write a policy to not pay this employee for the sick time over and above 8 hours (or their regular work day duration, in the case of part-time employees)? We do not have a formal flex-time policy, but regularly allow employees to work any schedule that works best for them, as long as they work their full scheduled amount of hours.

I am an exempt employee with my company based on my title being a staff accountant. I have worked for this company for two years now and prior to here recently if I took time off and during the week and happened to worked over 8 hours I only used the amount of sick or vacation time I needed to show 40 hours. This is standard practice within my company. Suddenly it is a problem for the exempt employees within my department only. They are saying that even though I worked 39.50 hours for the week that I must take 5 hours sick time for one day that I left early. Can they do this?

Thank you,

Miranda

Nonexempt employees must be paid time and half for overtime hours (any hours worked beyond 40 each week). As for what makes someone exempt or nonexempt, the factors are too numerous to describe here, but you can that info from the Department of Labor here:

http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/fairpay/fact_exemption.htm

Sam Narisi
Editor
HRTechNews.com

The DOL doesn’t require employees to be paid for the time they spend traveling to the normal place of business when responding to a call. They do need to be paid, however, for traveling to other locations (like a customer’s place of business).

That said, some companies elect to pay for travel time, or have a set minimum that must be paid to avoid resentment that might occur if an employee spends, say, an hour traveling round trip to do 15 minutes of paid work.

Sam Narisi
Editor
HRTechNews.com

Only government employers are allowed to offer the choice of “comp time” (time off for overtime hours, instead of overtime pay). All other employers must pay time and a half for any and all overtime worked.

Sam Narisi
Editor
HRTechNews.com

Excellent point about exempt employees.

An exempt employee has to be paid for the full day if her or she does any work that day. Taking time to reply would likely mean that an entire day’s worth of pay is due, even though the employee was supposed to be on unpaid leave.

Hope that helps.

Sam Narisi
Editor
HRTechNews.com

How does the use of Technology affect “time Worked” for Exempt employees?
For example, would an Exempt employee have to be paid for a full day worked when they took off for a personal reason, but replied to e-mails for about 10 minutes? [Assuming employee had no Paid Time Off available to use]