I have a salaried employee who is out sick out of her leave time. We offer STD and can help her file for this but do we have to pay her the full week if she has exhausted her PTO? Second question, can we make a policy that salaried employees can only miss X amount of time from work for sick days? We are afraid that we have an employee that calls out sick often and is paid for these days since she is salary exempt but abusing this. Thank you

Question 1:
Possibly. Is there any chance she is working any part of a day while she is out sick? Even 5 minutes or answering a call, text or email? If so, then Yes. She must be paid for her full day of work each day she is out sick.

Does your company have a written policy stating personal days or days off due to sickness will be docked when no work is performed and all paid time off has been exhausted? If no written policy is in place, she has to be paid for her sick days even if she performs no work at all on those days.

Question 2:
This sort of policy is not a good idea. Limiting the amount of time a person can be sick is hard given the fact that the ADA and FMLA provide such staunch protection. Does your company employ more than 15 people? If so ADA applies. More than 50? FMLA may apply. You didn’t mention in which state the employee works. Your state – or even city – may have local leave laws, as well.

You can find references to all of the ADA, FMLA and state leave laws under your HR Tool-Kit. I noticed that you have not yet registered on our new website. You will want to do so as our old site is not being updated. We sent an email about this and also have a pop-up on the site alerting our members of this change.

March 2018