The issue of entitlement to time off is an emotive one for most working professionals. This is true whether you are the boss, the manager or the only employee. As you have heard from this column many times, time is a very valuable asset for most individuals. Much of what time off an employee is entitled to has been legislated over the years I have been working. Thanks to maternity leave policies, it has even been okay to consider leave practices that vary by employee/gender/group. The argument that if time is given to one employee, then it must be made available to all employees has more recently been applied to the development of paternity leave policies. Statistics so far support the notion that what works for one group of employees may not apply or appeal equally to all employees.

Legislation may have set up annual holiday leave policies that most companies adhere to but it has yet to touch on a different dilemma -- leave entitlements that meet an employee's satisfaction. Given that the legislated policies are widely interpreted upon implementation, individual contracts need to be carefully crafted to succeed. What the entitlement dilemma illuminates for employers is the complex labyrinthine measures employees use to balance their entitled time. For example, few HR manuals describe how to compensate employees when they travel for the additional time "on the job" such as getting to the airport early and overnights including work done in the hotel room. Likewise, the late evenings in the office, the breakfast and dinner meetings, Saturday trade shows and midnight global concalls all constitute time that management has long considered due them from their well paid professional staff. And well it might be.

What is being calculated, however, is entitled time. I don't know an employee, no matter what their rank, who hasn't done a private accounting of their extra time expended and an offsetting accounting entry for making that time up in personal pursuits. Given that money runs neck and neck with time as a valuable asset in most people's minds, similar accounting is done for the expense sheet. Although leave entitlements for events of short duration like hours and days doesn't make for very interesting conversation, it can offer a great deal of comfort to have these policies outlined and referred to by your valued employees.