Many of my employees were unable to attend work recently due to the snow. Are they entitled to be paid for this time off?

With the recent bad weather causing a headache for employees to get into work, employers need to adopt a fair and consistent policy when it comes to dealing with absence caused by extreme weather conditions or disruptions to public transport.

The responsibility lies firmly with your employees to get to work regardless of weather conditions or other disruptions. Therefore unless there is a contractual obligation on you to provide transport for your employees to and from their place of work, then if they are unable to attend work in these circumstances, you are under no obligation to pay them.

In an ideal world employers would have a policy on how to deal with these unusual situations to ensure all staff know who to report to if they are unable to get to work, and also what options are available to them.

If an employee's normal mode of transport cannot be used in these circumstances, you should first encourage the employee to explore alternative means of safe transport. If this is not possible then consideration should be given whether the employee could usefully work from home until the weather situation improves.

If neither of these are viable options, then employers need to ensure that employees know that any time off work in these circumstances will be unpaid. The final option is that employees can request to take the time off as paid annual leave.

Different rules would apply if the business chose to close due to the severe weather conditions and your employees were ready and able to attend work. In this circumstance normal wages should be paid unless you have a contractual provision which allows you to consider this period an unpaid lay off period.