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FMLA is serious business.

Article Excerpt
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act a decade ago helped ensure fair and appropriate treatment of workers, but it also opened the door to administrative and legal nightmares for companies. To avoid unpleasant issues, organizations do well to take a proactive approach to FMLA administration.

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In the workplace, opinions about absences are widely varied, depending on who's absent from work that day and who's not. Maybe Ben Franklin was on the right track when he mused "The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse."

In fact, the subject of absence is as old as civilization, from Homer exclaiming "Achilles absent was Achilles still" to Brendan Behan's practical observation that "I was court-martialed in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence."

Absences are serious business. A company with 1,000 employees saves $720,000 annually (at a per-employee cost of $300) just by reducing its absence rate from 3 percent to 2 percent. Unfortunately, the discipline of absence management and concerted attention to the issue at the executive level is new. However, with major jury awards not only against corporations but holding management personally liable as well, executives are becoming more attuned to the seemingly innocuous topic of absence management and its companion threat, the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Uproar over absences

Given the common wisdom that employee absences are just a way of life in the workplace, why did anyone's blood pressure go off the charts over a supposedly bland human resources issue in the first place and lead to government intervention decades ago, a recent outbreak of lawsuits, and management being taken to the cleaners?

Take a glimpse at history When a blizzard paralyzed New York City in the late 1800s, approximately 200 people died attempting to get to work. Why not just take the day off? At that time, when a positive approach to employee management was unheard of, the management dictate was "Come to work every day or be...

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