Notification of New Year?

LindaS

How many of you notify your employees when they start a "new year" of FMLA?

POPEYE

We use the rolling backward method to calculate and only notify approximately 1 week before they exhaust their 12 weeks and then a notification that it is all gone. They then would not "start" a new year until they had a need and only then when time had fallen off from the prior year.

E Wart

E Wart
I don't see how you could "notify" your employees unless you use the "calendar year" method. (Why would you just "notify" all of your employees of this each year, if this is what you mean. I would think it would be terribly confusing to employees if you sent this out.) If you use the other methods of calcualtions, you have to wait until an even occurs until you know the year's time. They could have dropped some of the time used before they need to use it again.

Don D

I agree with E. Mass notification would be wasted time and would cost you more time in explanations. I would notify only a person who is nearing or has reached exhaustion of their current maximum. It's like the cops telling somebody they're almost reaching or have reached the speed limit. What's the point?

Theresa Gegen TX

Individual notifcation is not required. But your policy should state whether you use a calandar year or a rolling year. If it does not state either, you will be forced to use the most favorable to the employee under the circumstances.

Good Luck!

ssims

I can't see why you would want to use anything but the rolling year (year previous to requested start date). Otherwise they could stack 12 weeks at the end of one calendar year and 12 weeks of the next year. We track FML by the hours, 480 in a year, so when the employee goes over 400, whether continuous or intermittent, we send a notice. We then send another notice that it has ended once they have used 480 hours. If the 480 hours have taken the full year to use and they could be elegible for a new FML for this reason, we tell them that will need to complete a new request and certification if they have a need for it. If they have used all 480 hours and it is not over a year's time, then we tell them they will not be elegible to anymore FML time until whatever date that is. Yes it is a pain to track and get all these notices out, but I want documentation that we did our part to keep these employees informed of their rights. We have some employees that have multiple FML's running at overlapping time frames and so they are often using time up then gaining back, as I said it's a record keeping nightmare.

cthr

>I can't see why you would want to use anything but the rolling year
>(year previous to requested start date). Otherwise they could stack
>12 weeks at the end of one calendar year and 12 weeks of the next
>year.

I work in a state where state leave is available. We allow 16 weeks every 24 months. The 24 months starts ticking on the first day that they use leave. We run federal leave concurrently, so we use the same date for eligibility.

If a person hasn't been on FMLA before, we just use the calendar year method.

Blondie

Our company uses a calendar year this takes out the doubt of when and where.

HRQ

I notify on an individual basis. I use a year-at-a-glance calendar in Excel and black out each day as it is taken. We haven't had anyone on intermittent leave, so it's been easy to track by full days missed. I imagine we could track intermittent similarly by entering # of hours taken vs. blacking out entire days though.

The calendar helped me clearly demonstrate to an employee why she couldn't take the requested 10 weeks off starting this month - she'd already taken five weeks off a few months ago.

We use a rolling twelve week also.

HRQ

I meant to say we use a rolling 12 month calendar