The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) buries HR in forms. From the Notice of Eligibility & Rights and Responsibilities to the Certification of Health Care Provider for Employee’s Serious Health Condition, you’ll find all the forms you’ll need on the U.S. Department of Labor’s website:
- Employee’s serious health condition, form WH-380-E
- Family member’s serious health condition, form WH-380-F
- Qualifying Exigency, form WH-384
- Military Caregiver Leave of a Current Servicemember, form WH-385
- Military Caregiver Leave of a Veteran, form WH-385-V
- Eligibility Notice, form WH-381
- Rights and Responsibilities Notice, form WH-381
- Designation Notice, form WH-382
While the sheer number of these forms can overwhelm any leave manager, the forms themselves aren’t the problem. What causes HR’s workload to swell is the paperwork they require.
In this guide to FMLA forms and paperwork, we’ll show you how a manual approach to leave management saddles HR with tedious tasks. And we’ll explore how a technology-enabled leave program not only alleviates HR’s administrative burdens but also improves FMLA compliance and the employee experience.
The Real Burden Isn’t the Forms
In many organizations, FMLA forms still mean handwritten paperwork, fax machines, and snail mail. When that’s the case, FMLA paperwork usually isn’t the only task being handled the old-fashioned way. A lingering paper trail often signals that leave management is still a manual process, tracked through spreadsheets, shared folders, or even sticky notes.
The problem with this approach is threefold.
First, it’s slow. HR wastes valuable time entering data by hand, managing overloaded spreadsheets, and sending one-off communications.
Second, it’s prone to errors. When every leave request comes in through phone, email, or word of mouth, mistakes are almost inevitable. Missed deadlines or forgotten paperwork can carry serious consequences.
And third, it drains resources. Spreadsheets might save a few dollars, but they burn through time and increase legal risk. In fact, 43% of HR leaders in a recent AbsenceSoft survey cited FMLA compliance as a top leave management challenge.
What Manual FMLA Management Looks Like Today
In the day to day, manual leave management leaves HR with a heavy administrative load. Leave managers are constantly juggling timelines, calculating eligibility, and coordinating forms.
HR’s FMLA to-do list often includes:
- Confirming eligibility within five business days.
- Sending notices promptly.
- Orchestrating certification of an employee’s injury or illness.
- Orchestrating certification of the injury or illness of a family member.
- Tracking leave usage, especially for intermittent cases.
- Monitoring recertifications.
- Coordinating employees’ return to work.
- Managing leave across jurisdictions.
These tasks are convoluted and time-consuming for straightforward FMLA requests. When workers ask for a more complicated request, HR’s workload quickly intensifies.
Let’s say that an employee asks to take FMLA leave to receive treatment for her major depressive disorder. She’ll need a few hours off each week to see her doctor and attend therapy appointments. This type of FMLA leave — intermittent leave — poses a big challenge to leave managers, who must send out absence notifications, manage staffing ratios, and carefully track how much leave the employee uses.
It’s no wonder that managing intermittent leave was the #2 leave management challenge, according to a recent AbsenceSoft survey. But intermittent leave isn’t HR’s only problem: about a third of respondents were also concerned about calculating eligibility for leave, delivering a positive employee experience, and tracking and reporting on leave usage and other data.
Compliance Risk is Still High
Managing FMLA leave manually comes with many risks. HR may be slow to respond to requests, lose track of forms and certifications, or improperly calculate someone’s eligibility.
These mistakes result from poor leave processes, and they directly impact the employee experience. In fact, many of the frustrations employees encountered when taking leave could result from manual processes. Nearly half of respondents said the leave process was confusing or unclear. Some employees reported that their manager was unprepared for their return — or that they didn’t know when they were supposed to come back to work themselves.
Employees with poor leave experiences reported they were less loyal to their company, less motivated when they returned to work, and more interested in pursuing new professional opportunities.
Manual processes risk more than the employee experience, however; they also create the potential for litigation. Employers may face lawsuits or government fines if they improperly deny someone FMLA leave, or if they deviate from the rules mandated by the Act itself.
How Time-Strapped HR Teams are Modernizing FMLA
The manual approach to FMLA, with all its risks and inefficiencies, doesn’t have to be the norm.
More employers are turning to technology to better manage FMLA leave. With the right tools, HR teams can lighten their administrative load, stay compliant, and create a smoother experience for employees.
Take the AbsenceSoft platform, for example. It modernizes FMLA management from the moment an employee requests a leave. Leave managers can open a case in just a few clicks, and employees can use a self-service portal to submit requests, check status, and see how much leave they’ve used.
The platform is powered by the AbsenceSoft Compliance Engine™ (ACE), which helps employers stay ahead of complex regulations. ACE supports more than 200 federal and state leave and accommodations laws, including the FMLA, the ADA, and the PWFA. Built and maintained by in-house legal experts, it frees HR to focus less on legislative tracking and more on employee support.
Technology also improves the employee experience for HR itself. The ACE Packet Generator automates forms like the FMLA’s Notice of Eligibility and Rights & Responsibilities. With just one click, HR can generate, prefill, and send compliant packets — and attach them directly to a communication.
As employees and leave managers move through the process, the platform tracks every form and deadline to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Automated reminders keep everyone informed and on track.
FMLA Forms Aren’t Going Away — But Paperwork Should Be
The FMLA has been around for more than three decades. It’s safe to say that HR will be dealing with forms WH-380 and WH-381 for the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean leave managers should be buried in paperwork forever.
When HR leverages modern, purpose-built technology, they can eliminate the administrative burden that comes with FMLA management. Careful use of automation allows leave managers to use human judgment while promoting consistency and saving time.
Leave managers may not have a choice but to use manual methods if their processes haven’t been digitally transformed. But consider the costs of this approach: when HR is buried in paperwork and spreadsheets, the department loses time and takes on risk. By investing in purpose-built technology, HR may save so much time that it can take on more strategic projects that do more for the bottom line than an antiquated leave program ever could.
With AbsenceSoft, HR teams swap sticky notes, spreadsheets, and paperwork for one centralized, purpose-built system that leverages intelligent automation to provide a consistent, compliant approach to the FMLA. To see how your team could benefit from AbsenceSoft, schedule a personalized demo today.