We currently have a policy that you must take 5 consecutive vacation days. How do you handle if someone uses all their sick days, then uses vacation days as sick days, and then needs a vacation day for a sickness but only has five vacation days left? Can you force them to take all five days? Then they will want us to just dock them any day they have the sniffles, which doesn't seem fair to other employees. I don't think we should make exceptions to our internal controls. How do others handle similar situations?

As long as they were absent from work for 5 days with no access to your systems, whether sick or vacation, what is the difference? It is a risk control issue and serves the same purpose.

True, but what if absences were intermittent, not consecutive?

Then they have an issue if you plan on enforcing your policy.

IMO, if the employee is out of sick days and vacation days but needs to take 5 consecutive days off per your policy, then the days off would be unpaid leave.

Sounds like there's a bigger issue with the employee than the ability to take 5 consecutive vacation days.

I wonder if you can "reserve" 40 hours of time each year to satisfy your requirement.

I worked for plenty of employers that required vacation time to be scheduled in advance of the year, though it is less likely now. However, I've had one employer combine both sick and vacation time into a single PTO bank. They still required a full week be taken off during the year. But as Randy pointed out, the requirement of a week off with no access is a risk control, so if an employee was avoiding that solid block of time then you may want to scrutinize their work.

One question I've always had: in the case of the "requirement" of taking 5 consecutive days off of work; my impression was that it was always for "audit" purposes. But how many banks ACTUALLY "audit" the employee that's away? I have been a teller for decades; both as a line employee and as a manager, and I have never once in all that time had someone from the back end reach out regarding transaction "patterns" or have done any type of research on an employee, other than counting their drawer prior to them leaving. Is this "5 Day Rule" passe?

Some frauds have to be constantly monitored by the perpetrator, maybe through fake balancing, daily entries to hide the fraud, etc. If someone has to step in to do the fraudsters job during the 5 days, you'd be surprised what they might find. When I first started, you had to take 10 consecutive days! I think it is still a valid internal control. But with technology, you have to make sure they don't have electronic access to their job for the 5 days as well.

I honestly don't understand why some banks would still be segregating "sick days" and "vacation days". I don't understand why any employer should really care anymore WHY their employee is out. I think combined PTO days make more sense. Then there wouldn't be any question of whether they have to use "sick days" or whatever....it would simply be a question of "you don't have enough days left", you're going to have to take unpaid leave.

I don't care why an employee is off but vacation days are use it or lose it; sick days can be banked. I'm happy knowing that if I'm out for a couple of months with a serious illness, I'll continue to collect my full salary because of my banked sick days.

I can understand that, but couldn't you just as easily have PTO days and let them be banked (at least some of them)?

We cannot bank PTO at all, it is either use them or lose them. I do miss the days when we could bank vacation and sick time.

We allow 10 days to be rolled over to the next year, but then you are creating a snowball effect with accumulating days that may never be used.

We've set a maximum number of hours of unused PTO/Vacation time - it equals approximately 1.7 times the annual accrual. Once the max is met, no more time is accrued until some is used.

back to the original question, you have 3 choices:

1. bypass the policy that requires 5 consecutive days off and don't require them to do this (perhaps with understanding this is a 1-time only and future they go unpaid or something along those lines, and requiring exec mgmt approval to allow)
2. make the employee take 5 consecutive days, knowing that some or all may be unpaid but hold to policy
3. change the policy to remove this requirement (although some regulators still have it so you will need to validate with yours to determine if this is even possible) if your bank is willing to accept the risk

I just read through our policy. Here is what we have:

It is required that all employees take 7 consecutive calendar days off a minimum of one time per year. If you have not taken 7 consecutive calendar days off by Dec 1st, you will be required to take the first week of December off. If you are eligible for PTO, this time will be charged against your time off bank. If you do not have any days remaining, the time off will be unpaid. If you are not eligible for PTO, this time off will be unpaid.