Why does HR override a manager's discretion?

Why are HR such a*holes? Denying bereavement leave when someone lost a parent? Monsters!

Last week I commented on a post about someone whose friend, after losing a parent, had their bereavement leave denied.

Except, it wasn't really denied. It was all just a big misunderstanding. 

This person took the company's 5 days of bereavement leave, and asked their manager to extend the leave by 2 days. 

The manager approved, but HR came in and said that the 2 extra days had to come from PTO, not bereavement.

Their conclusion: If the policy says "at the manager's discretion," HR had no right to deny it.

And HR are petty monsters.

Except, here's the thing: the leave wasn't denied. 

Having designed and implemented dozens of these policies, I could tell exactly what happened. 

It was the manager, not HR, who owed this person an apology.

Let me explain.

First, this was indeed very badly mishandled. No doubt about that.

People SHOULD NOT be denied time to grieve. Grief doesn't follow a schedule. If there's a program in place to pay them for that time, they should be paid for it without question or pushback.

Got it?

Except paying someone for the less common leave types like bereavement, jury duty, or caregiver leave, isn't as straightforward as one might think. 

In many companies, these leave types get their own "bank" of days so it doesn't get pulled from PTO. 

Leave in these situations is also protected, so it's important to track them separately to make sure that the protections are triggered. 

These measures are a good thing. They protect people's rights and pay. 

When someone is paid for a day they didn't work, it MUST be entered into payroll as some kind of Paid Time Off type. Otherwise, there's no way to pay it. 

Most of the uncommon leave types don't allow negative balances in payroll systems. So if your time off isn't allocated to another bucket, it can't get paid. 

The discrepancy could even block payroll and prevent everyone from getting paid.

The only way to pay it is to deny the request and reallocate the time to a different PTO bucket. 

Or just deny the request to unblock payroll, mark them as worked, and sort it out later. 

But when you deny the request to unblock payroll, the system will send an automated message telling the employee that their request is DENIED. 

Which is why communication is so important.

By going off half-cocked and approving the request without understanding how the policy actually worked, the manager set an expectation that led to a tragic misunderstanding. 

By chalking it up to "HR being an asshole," the manager made it seem like the company was denying this person's grief. A narrative that undoubtedly added to their pain during a very rough time. 

Words matter. When a decision is "at the manager's discretion," it's still the manager's responsibility to work with other departments to ensure it's executed correctly. 

In this case, the manager didn't do that. With tragic results.

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