Deadlines, paperwork, calculations, decrements, communications. These are just a few of the responsibilities that fall on HR by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Get just one of these wrong, and you could face employee frustration, fines, or legal action.
When HR attempts to handle too many FMLA cases manually, it increases the risk of mistakes and the consequences they entail. For large workforces, the FMLA involves too many moving parts to be handled by hand. With leave requests on the rise and compliance growing more complex, HR can’t afford to forgo any opportunity to simplify FMLA management.
When HR teams streamline their FMLA work, they give themselves more bandwidth, allowing them to provide more one-on-one support to employees. Employees often take FMLA leave to deal with intense personal circumstances. They may be fighting cancer, helping a loved one recover from a serious injury, or adjusting to life with a new baby.
Whatever the situation, employees using FMLA leave could benefit from a kind note or an empathetic conversation. AbsenceSoft intelligently automates FMLA processes so HR has the time to provide that kind of support. Our platform reduces administrative burden, ensures compliance, and supports employees from day one. In this article, we show you how we harness automation to make your approach to FMLA faster and more compliant.
What Parts of the FMLA Process Can Be Intelligently Automated?
Before we dive in, let’s begin with the basics. What is automation? Put simply, automation is the process of using technology to perform tasks without human intervention. In the context of leave management, automation can streamline repetitive tasks like sending packets, writing emails, tracking time out, and calculating eligibility and entitlements. Automation not only increases the efficiency of these tasks but also reduces the likelihood of errors.
What do We Mean by Intelligent Automation in FMLA Management?
Let’s go a step further and explore intelligent automation. This type of automation uses AI to further streamline processes. AI can scan medical documentation, for example, to assess it for completeness. Or it could gather information from employees for leave intake and planning purposes.
To fully appreciate the benefits of intelligent automation in FMLA management, it helps to consider what the process looks like without the help of technology.
Let’s consider the leave intaking process. Without automation, employees with leave requests must call or email HR during business hours and wait for a reply. Once HR connects with the employee, someone has to capture all relevant information about the leave request by hand. If an employee forgets something, a follow-up call or email becomes necessary. Whenever HR needs access to the case details, a team member has to look it up in a spreadsheet or file.
Here’s the bottom line: FMLA management is a long, cumbersome process when automation isn’t in the picture. Now, let’s get specific about everything intelligent automation can accomplish for leave managers.
Smart, Self-Service Leave Intake
Now let’s think about what the intake process looks like with the addition of intelligent automation.
First, employees who need leave can use a self-service portal that lets them request time off from any device, at any time. The portal prompts them to enter every piece of relevant information to reduce the burden on HR. Once submitted, each request goes directly to a centralized platform that HR can easily access — no more spreadsheets, shared drives, or files.
Of course, an employee may still call or email HR directly with a leave request. When this happens, HR can use the platform to open a case in seconds. And each case comes with pre-filled employee data.
Automating Calculations with a Compliance Engine
Without automation, eligibility and entitlement calculations are challenging to perform and difficult to get right. HR has to collect all of the relevant employee data, accounting for job codes, benefits levels, schedules, calendars, and worksites.
Considering all of those details, HR must make the correct determination, approving or denying the leave request according to the FMLA’s many rules and guidelines. Leave managers then need to figure out how much leave an employee is entitled to and track their usage, always keeping in mind when entitlements reset.
Automation completely transforms the calculation process. With a compliance engine informed by real compliance experts, HR can generate eligibility and entitlements instantaneously. Calculations can account for different entitlements, locations, and custom employer policies. Integrations with HR systems of record ensure that decisions are based on accurate data.
Once a decision is made, HR can automate all of the communications that follow, dispatching them via text and email. The team can also accurately track and decrement time used automatically once an employee goes out on leave.
Streamlining Communications and Paperwork
Communications and paperwork can be deeply painful for HR and employees alike. Without automation, this process usually deteriorates into email chaos: Long back-and-forth chains where employees and leave managers try to hash out the details of leave certification.
The un-automated paperwork and communications process entails more than email, however. Here’s what HR has to do to manage it manually:
- Create calendar reminders for follow ups.
- Notify managers with last-minute callouts to schedule replacement workers.
- Locate all relevant forms, letters, instructions, and resources — and attach them all to email.
- Ensure all forms are sent out according to the FMLA’s mandated timelines.
- Receive, review, and evaluate medical certifications, storing them securely for future reference.
This process couldn’t look more different with the addition of automation. Here’s how intelligent automation transforms paperwork and communications:
- Communications are automatically sent to employees via email and text throughout the leave process.
- Forms are instantly attached to pre-generated communications based on employee eligibility and entitlements.
- Incoming medical forms and documents can be automatically attached to each case.
- Employees can text completed forms and documents, which are attached to their case and stored securely and centrally.
- Medical certifications are automatically reviewed via AI for completeness.
Centralized, Automated Case Management
Case management devolves quickly without the intervention of technology. Manual FMLA tracking can look like something out of the 1980s, with leave managers using sticky notes, handwritten checklists, and physical folders to organize each employee’s details.
This approach offers little accountability and zero visibility into the workings of a team. Cases can fall through the cracks. Coverage is questionable when a leave team member needs a day off. And the organization can’t see any trends in usage, in caseloads per manager, or other helpful metrics.
Automation solves these limitations. With a platform that leverages automation, HR can automatically generate to-do tasks for every open request, prioritized by urgency. Leaders can view these items in aggregated windows and reassign tasks as necessary. Most importantly, these duties can be easily tracked and centrally managed.
What’s more, the data created by these processes generates consolidated dashboards and instant reporting for real-time insights. These enable strategic decision-making and better team management.
Ensuring a Smooth Return to Work
The return-to-work process is often an afterthought. Stakeholders lose track of the date of return, which results in no one being prepared for an employee’s arrival.
When this process is automated, employees, managers, teammates, and HR enjoy a smooth re-entry. Automated notifications arrive via text and email reminding the employee of their upcoming return. IT, managers, building managers, and others can also receive these reminders, ensuring the employee feels like their arrival was expected. Automation also ensures that the details of this process — from fitness for duty paperwork to payroll forms — are surfaced, completed, and documented.
Program Transformation with Data and Insights
AbsenceSoft features dashboards that keep you up to date on caseload, leave types, return dates, and more. This information gives you real-time insight into your team’s workload, the status of employees, and the overall portrait of your leave and accommodations program.
Our platform can also create custom reports. We can generate information ahead of audits, for instance, that can pull comprehensive case records instantly for a full view of documentation, decisions, and all communications, including texts and emails.
For example, your team can benefit from a caseload report. This report is vital to ensure that work is being properly allocated to each member of the leave team. A caseload report will display each leave manager’s workload, detailing their:
- Number of cases
- Case type
- Length of each case
How Do You Automate an FMLA Process into a Workflow?
Let’s dig into the specifics of how you can use automation to streamline FMLA management into one efficient workflow.
What is a Workflow?
A workflow automatically triggers events to happen based on an action taken by the user. They can range from very simple to extremely complex. Within a leave platform, workflows can automate the manual processes associated with FMLA management. The AbsenceSoft platform, for examples, offers workflows that are ready out of the box and outfitted with best practices. We also offer the flexibility that allows users to create their own workflows.
How an FMLA Process can Transform into a Workflow
As every leave manager knows, the FMLA management process is quite complicated. But it can still be distilled into a workflow.
Any repetitive process can be made into a workflow. It’s worth noting that workflows can be customized based on job title, tenure, different applicable policies, benefit levels, and other factors. When people with different job codes enter a workflow, it can still calculate entitlements for specific benefits.
Why FMLA Automation is Needed Now More Than Ever
The FMLA has been around for more than 30 years, but it’s still a significant frustration for many organizations. In fact, 43% of respondents in our recent survey said that FMLA compliance is their top leave challenge.
The FMLA isn’t the only thing complicating compliance. The law intersects with other statutes including the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, and state statutes that are rapidly multiplying and shifting.
As HR frets over compliance, they face other worries, too. Employee expectations continue to rise: Workers want leave processes that are fast, easy, and fair.
These priorities duel for HR’s attention, but one cannot be sacrificed for the other. The stakes are too high. HR cannot ease up on compliance, nor can they let the employee experience go by the wayside. To deliver on both, HR must tap automation to streamline compliance and boost the employee experience. Automation ensures employers stay compliant and competitive.
Check out AbsenceSoft’s Comprehensive HR Guide to FMLA Compliance.
Key Benefits of Intelligent Automation for HR Teams
Automating FMLA processes provides many benefits to HR teams, who endure chronic stress and pressure due to manual workloads, increasingly complex compliance burdens, and rising leave requests. Here’s how AbsenceSoft uses automation to address those challenges:
- It eliminates manual calculations and written paperwork. The FMLA will always involve significant math and paperwork. With automation, those two tasks are significantly less burdensome. Our platform also generates automatic alerts and follow-up communications for employees to remind workers what forms need to be returned by when.
- It tracks all case steps with audit-ready documentation. One of the challenges of FMLA management is documentation. It’s necessary, but it’s time consuming. The AbsenceSoft platform eases documentation by automatically creating and storing it in a central location.
- It creates real-time alerts and task prompts. With automation, HR doesn’t have to worry about missed deadlines or dropped tasks. AbsenceSoft creates alerts and prompts to make sure no form, request, or employee falls through the cracks. When a member of the HR team is out of office, our platform even reassigns cases with critical timelines to other team members.
- It saves time and reduces error. FMLA leave doesn’t always run during one chunk of time. And it’s not always the only leave to apply. When FMLA is intermittent, concurrent, or both, AbsenceSoft tracks employees’ schedules and time used.
Integration with Your Existing HR Tech
At AbsenceSoft, our integrations share data seamlessly between our platform and the rest of your tech stack. Within the AbsenceSoft platform, you can integrate the platform with:
- HRIS and HCM: When you integrate AbsenceSoft with your HRIS or HCM, you can power real-time insights into your leave program with up-to-date information about your workforce. You can get the full picture of where your employees are, all in one place.
- Time and attendance: By integrating AbsenceSoft with your time and attendance system, you can easily see which employees are on leave. You can also see important dates associated with leave, such as when an employee is expected back, to inform shift coverage.
- Payroll systems: Integrate AbsenceSoft with your payroll system to instantly know if a leave should be paid or unpaid. You can also import PTO balances to AbsenceSoft to display every available time away option for employees so everyone gets a full picture of available benefits and entitlements.
Our seamless integrations ensure data accuracy across platforms. These connections promote the employee experience, making sure employees are paid appropriately, for example. By having employee data flow to (inbound) and from (outbound) the system, the platform can calculate eligibility more accurately, provide in-depth data analysis, and then tell other systems information about pay, time usage, return to work dates, and more.
For more on automation, download our guide: How to Modernize and Automate FMLA Management.
Customer Results: Real-World Impact
See how three organizations have benefitted from automating FMLA management with AbsenceSoft.
- Washington Federal Bank reduced leave request delays with by automating its processes with AbsenceSoft. Text messaging made the employee experience faster and more personalized.
- A national healthcare provider cut its manual processes by 75% when it switched to AbsenceSoft. With their newly automated workflows, the team increased its caseload by 174%.
- Leander Independent School District’s small leave team was once calculating leave entitlements for 30 different employee calendars all by hand. It scrapped this error-prone process for automated leave management. Now, the team knows eligibility and entitlements are accurate for its thousands of employees across 44 campuses.
Enhance FMLA Management with AbsenceSoft
Is your team ready to simplify and refine its approach to FMLA management? Automation makes way for faster processes, greater personalization, and reduced compliance risk.
To learn how your organization can benefit from automation via AbsenceSoft, book a demo today.