If you choose to offer paid time off for vacation and illness, here are some tips for creating a fair and sensible policy.

You may be surprised to learn that you are not legally required to provide paid vacation or sick leave to your employees.

Even employers in California, where employees have a legal right to take some paid time off to care for family members, don't have to chip in for this leave -- it's paid out of the state's temporary disability program, which is funded entirely by mandatory withholdings from employees' paychecks. (To learn more about this program, go to the website of California's Employment Development Division, http://www.edd.ca.gov, and select "Paid Family Leave.")

You could choose to offer no paid leave -- although a policy like this could make it tough to attract high-quality employees in a competitive market. If you decide to adopt a policy that gives your employees paid vacation or sick time, here are some general considerations to keep in mind:

• Apply the policy consistently to all employees. If you offer some employees a more attractive package than others, you are opening yourself up to claims of unfair treatment -- and inviting morale problems.

• Require employees to schedule leave in advance, if possible. Sometimes, an employee cannot know ahead of time that he or she will need time off -- for a sudden illness or family emergency, for example. In all other circumstances, however, you should ask your employees to schedule leaves -- particularly vacations -- at least a month in advance. This will help you make sure your staffing needs are met, particularly during summers and holidays.

• Adopt a sensible vacation accrual policy. Many of us enjoy taking a longer vacation from time to time, and a policy that allows employees to save up a long stretch of vacation time -- four weeks, say -- for this purpose is reasonable. You may want to put some cap on how much vacation time your employees can accrue or use at one time, however. Otherwise, you may suddenly have several employees asking for months off at a time. And until those employees take their long vacation, they may suffer from job burn-out from years of work without time off.