Advice on Leave - please help!

[Lamonmi]

We are a new company, just setting things up and I was wondering what kind of leave would you allocate to someone who could not make it to work due to a bush fire... they were evacuated form the house yesterday and all the roads are blocked. It's not sick leave - and we don't want to give him unpaid leave.. would it be compassionate?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Cottoneyes]

Most companies have a policy around emergency leave or the like as an added type of leave that can be provided (paid or unpaid) at the companies or managers discretion.

If you go down this path and have electronic leave application and approvals, leave it off it as it will get abused by someone at some stage and a manager will be sure to not know what they are doing it and approve it for 'moving house', 'buying a new car' or some other pitiful excuse like I have seen first hand

[Tiger]

If you are resolute about tracking all leave, then another option might be Community Leave, one of the National Employment Standards; OR just give him the time with pay and have him work some overtime or something later to help offset it.

I've worked for companies who had a "special leave" policy which covered exceptions to the general 'official' types of leave ie would cover this kind of contingency.

I doubt there is anything out there which beats this current fire situation - seems to happen every summer somewhere in Australia - so I'd recommend just giving him whatever time he needs as paid leaveand proceed to getting your policies in place quickly so everyone is on the same page for future events.

"Moving House" and "buying a new car" are annual leave as far as I'm concerned ie you can do it on a weekend - those are NOT emergencies - but Cottoneyes is right, some employees will try anything sometimes so your policies need to be quite clear with "at company discretion" being the final arbiter.

Tiger