Grief and loss is an unfortunate part of life. As a human, you’ve probably experienced it yourself. As an employer, you’ve probably had your staff experience bereavement too.
In fact, recent grief statistics suggest:
- More than 1 in 20 Brits has experienced the death of a spouse
- Almost half have experienced the death of a parent
- More than 1 in 20 has experienced the death of a child under 18
So handling grief and bereavement is a part of life – for both you and your employees.
But what are your employees’ rights to time off in the event of a bereavement?
How much time off are employees entitled to for bereavement or compassionate leave?
The short answer is that, in most cases, they’re not legally entitled to any paid leave for compassionate or bereavement grounds.
The exception is in circumstances when someone loses a child under the age of 18 (Parental Bereavement Leave) including a stillbirth after 24 weeks.
We’ll talk about Parental Bereavement Leave in a moment. But first let’s look at other types of bereavement leave.
How much time off should you give employees?
Now, outside of Parental Bereavement Leave, your employees aren’t entitled to any paid leave legally.
But many organisations have compassionate leave policies that extend to close family.
You can of course enable people to take unpaid leave or even annual leave from their holiday allowance. But ultimately, many employers will choose to allow some paid time off. How much you allow will depend, I suppose, on how many employees you have (you have to appreciate that this policy could be used by everyone and of course, in the interests of assessing your business productivity, you need to consider how much time off that might mean across your workforce).
Typical allowances could be anything from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. Sometimes employers will limit who it applies to (e.g. “immediate family” with a definition of what that is). From a human perspective, some flexibility is probably worth having here. For example, some people may barely know some of their “immediate” family but have an incredibly close relationship with a cousin or an Aunt who passes. It’s never straightforward and simple to manage, but my own view is that some informal flexibility and humanity in a time of grief is important.
It’s worth noting that employees are entitled to unpaid time off to attend a funeral if it’s the funeral of a dependent.
Parental Bereavement Leave
Where the law steps in is when someone experiences the death of a child aged under 18.
In these circumstances, employees are entitled to Parental Bereavement Leave, which is essentially 2 weeks of leave and statutory pay for each child who dies.
A few things to note:
- This is 2 weeks for each child who dies (so if 2 children die, this would be 4 weeks)
- This leave can be used at any time in the 56 weeks following the death
- This can be used if en employee was the adoptive parent (living with the child) intended adopted parent, birth parent or carer who had been living with the child for 4 weeks or more prior to the death
You can find out more about Statutory Parental Leave and Pay on the Gov website.
In Short…
As employers, of course we’re going to have to consider productivity implications of any policies. But it’s also important to consider the wellbeing of employees.
We’d always suggest getting professional advice before putting together policies like this. But if you are employing people then a bereavement leave policy is probably an important thing to have.
