FMLA STATS

mmurnahan

Does anyone out there have any stats on FMLA usage for your organizagion?
We are a healthcare and medical billing organization with approximately 1300 employees. The managers of the billing departments are frustrated with intermittent FMLA. They are "bottom line" managers.

I track FMLA on a spread sheet. From 1/1/03 - 6/16/03 we have 66 employees who were either on fmla effective 1/1/03 or have applied for fmla since 1/1/03. out of the 66, 17 are intermittent for a serious health condition of a family member.

This is the area the managers are having a problem with. We requie anyone applying for intermittent fmla for health condition to have a physician statement documenting the health condition and the need for occassional leave. The medical documentation must be updated every 6 months.

Our managers feel this is open access for employees to be absent.

Does anyone have any stats? I would like to know if our organization has an unusually high FMLA usage rate.

Hunter1

Unfortunately, my statistics are slightly worse than yours. We've had 17 employees on FMLA since January out of 250, so almost 7%. Part of our reason is that in Wisconsin, we have 'substitution' in our law which allows employees to substitute any accrued paid time for unpaid family leave, so all of our employees get paid for their FMLA.

CAL

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 06-16-03 AT 11:31AM (CST)[/font][p]We are a large organization (5000+) and our total LOAs are currently running at about 10.5% of employee population, with intermittent LOAs making up about 1.5% of the population. This has remained fairly consistent for the past three years +/- .5%.

Oh, and we are a national company.

psrcello

We have about 275 employees, and in 2002, 63 employees used FMLA. There were 17 leaves of between 2 and 12 weeks, and 16 fairly short-term leaves. Our biggest issue is that we had 35 employees with intermittent leaves for chronic serious health conditions (the numbers don't add up because some employees had both long term and intermittent leaves.)

Our overall absenteeism rate last year was 2.11%, not including FMLA leave. If we included time lost to FMLA, that rate jumps to 3.92%. Employees utilized 9,333 hours of FMLA time, which is the equivalent of 4.5 full time employees.

So far, I've been unsuccessful in finding the "silver bullet" solution to the intermittent leave issue, despite managers and supervisors continually beating me about the head and implying that it is somehow "my fault" that they have these FMLA attendance issues!

ssims

Sorry, I don't think there is a good answer to the intermittent leave, it is abused and there is very little a company can do about it. You can't require documentation past the certification. However, I don't think it matters what state you are in, the statue states the the employee or the Company can use any paid leave time available during an approved FML and you must track it in as small an increment as you record time. You must tell the employee up front that you are using any paid leave time off for FML and you must do it for all who qualify. We do this, and the record keeping for intermittent leave is a nightmare. A couple of things that will help, supervisors must notify H.R. or send the employee to HR if there is a request or need information about FML, only HR can approve any leave. Of course we post the notice and we explain it in detail in our handbook. I also have the person that monitors the call-ins and the person that enters the attendance notify us if someone has called in for 3 or more days for illness or if they indicate their might be a serious illness issue. If in doubt, we send the employee the paperwork with a note explaining the process for applying for FML. We document that it was sent also. Another thing we do is to once a year we bring in our attorney for a Saturday meeting with all managment and supervision to update all on all HR issues. It is a mandatory meeting. If those "bottom line" people want to argue with him, he is more than capable of explaining to them the possible consequeces of violating one of these laws. He points to the possible liability for the company as well as the supervisor or manager's personal liability. He stresses how this might impact their position with the company. Nothing is a threat but it has seemed to make them all more responsible for their actions, they at least will call me now if they have a concern. We are a private, family owned business and have 3 separate companies with a total of over 600 emloyees in three separate towns. Even though I have a personnel assistant in each of the other two towns, all payroll and HR oversight is done from my office. I have a small capable staff (4 local and 2 remote)and not much is automated, I have one person who spends 8 to 12 hours every week just dealing with FML paperwork and records. It is irritating when you know someone is abusing it but most of the time you cannot do anything about it. Hope this helps.
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