Curbing Employee Absence Abuse with BASIC
An employee’s ability to sporadically take small increments of FMLA leave not only generates administrative headaches for employers, but also raises concerns about employee absence abuse. FMLA offense most commonly occurs with manufactures, retail companies, unions, school districts and city officials. With leave on the rise, HR departments are realizing their recordkeeping and management of Family Medical Leave Act requests and absences is so poor, they are uncertain how many days off their employees are taking or how much abuse is occurring.
The Federal Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 entitles qualifying employees to take 12 weeks of leave for theirs’ or a family member’s serious health condition and up to 26 weeks for military caregiver leave. This leave can be taken in one block, over several blocks of time or intermittently as medical issues arise. As such,intermittent leave continuously gives HR departments the biggest headaches.
Lost time claims can cost organizations more than $19,000 per employee per year according to Employee Benefit News, September 2010. With that in mind, employers are becoming more aware of their option to outsource absence & FMLA management. Outsourcing these services allows employers to save money by reallocating resources once tasked with administrating FMLA. BASIC achieves this through consistent management of leaves and through decreasing the time employees spend away from work.
When medical issues are stated for the reason of intermittent leave,employers are limited in how deeply they can pry into an employee’s medical situation without violating HIPAA. This makes detecting employee abuse very difficult, and leads many employers to outsource their FMLA administration, because they feel liketheir employees “take advantage of the system.” HR departments often run into a high number of requests for leave on Mondays, Fridays and before and after a holiday.
BASIC can help reduce risk, reduce cost and reduce abuse!
BASIC’s Absence Management and FMLA systems are designed to simplify employer administration and improve employer efficiency. We are able to create a “uniform and sustainable” method to track employee absence without creating additional administrative burden. Employers achieve greater ability to manage employee absence with critical data tohelp schedule staff, identify absence patterns by department (by day or by employee) and record real time information and historical absence data.
To view more on BASIC’s Absence Management Service, visit:
https://www.basiconline.com/solutions/hrs/absence-management/
To view more on BASIC’s FMLA Services, visit:
https://www.basiconline.com/solutions/hrs/fmla/
To request a proposal for Absence and/or FMLA Management, visit:
https://www.basiconline.com/product_services/request-a-proposal/
