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Leave management administration is a time-consuming and complex process. You need to plan, track, and manage employee leaves, including administration, claims management, return-to-work support, and reporting. Many businesses are opting to outsource their employee leave management – here are the top reasons why:
Why Outsource Employee Leave Management?
1. Stay Up to Date on HR Laws
Outsourcing your leave management ensures you are adhering to FMLA laws, state laws, and medical leave compliance. If you have multi-state operations, this can be exceptionally complicated and require specialized talent to manage it.
2. Absence Tracking Software
Accuracy and record keeping are critical to effectively managing leave cases. Not every company makes this technology investment. You need a system that supports federal and state changes to ensure compliance, provides 24/7 access and an employee portal to give your staff access to request leave and see updates or changes.
3. Leave Management Competency
Whoever is handling your leave management must be an expert at policy interpretation, standardized processes for handling communications, tracking, and compliance. You don’t want to use a call center; you need a dedicated resource assigned to your account who is the primary contact for the employee, supervisor, and HR department. You also want staff available to review and improve your existing policies.
4. Leave Validation Services
Medical certification is required from the health care provider to validate that an employee’s leave is necessary. To reduce employee FMLA abuse and avoid careless lack of follow up, you want case managers that will stay on top of completed certification documentation and follow up with doctors and insurance providers, and support the employee to quickly return to work. An outsourced leave management partner can do all that.
5. Complete, Reliable Documentation
When it comes to proper leave management, documentation is everything. Avoid manually tracking documentation as you can easily miss key touch points. You want every interaction, phone call, and voice recording entered into a secure, centralized database for quick recall.
6. Education and Training
FMLA is more than paperwork processing. Clarity of FMLA eligibility, employee rights, workplace accommodations under the ADA, and the process for requesting leave needs to be shared with managers, employees, and your HR team. An outsourced leave management partner can provide manager training and education for employees and HR staff so everyone understands your leave policies.
7. Skilled Employee Relations
Studies have shown that employees return to work from leave sooner if they feel valued. Outsourcing your leave management can help with training supervisors to make employees feel they were missed, ensuring a smooth transition when they return from leave.
8. Consistent Communication
The communication process is critical for both the employer and the employee on leave. Payroll, finance, and benefits all have a vested interest in the cost of employees being out of work. An established feedback loop is critical to controlling costs. You need weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly reporting, as well as meeting periodically to assess the program and control costs.
9. Payroll and Employee Handbook Integration
There must be an integrated system approach to managing leave programs. You want to make sure your leave tracking and pay integrates with your payroll system. This will save time, avoid duplicate entries, and reduce errors. You also need to identify any missing employee handbook policies or changes in the law, and ensure FMLA rules are clearly outlined so there are no discrepancies when your employees request leave.
10. Reduce Your Risk
Administering FMLA is about managing risk to your organization. Outsourcing your leave management can reduce this risk by accurately determining employee eligibility, reviewing all the medical documents involved, seeking clarification of that paperwork when needed, offering guidance on leave/workplace accommodation requests to be considered, managing and tracking all the paperwork, communicating with employees as well as management about the leave process, answering questions, coordinating pay and benefits for employees out on leave, monitoring changing laws and guaranteeing that they are incorporated immediately, tracking employees’ leave time, and ensuring that FMLA and other applicable leave law rules are applied in the same way with everyone. You want a partner that works to ensure that not only does your organization remain compliant with the law, but that your employees have a good experience while they are out on a leave before they return to work.
GTM’s Leave Management Service
GTM’s leave management specialists handle all of the above, providing seamless, efficient, and competent leave administration services. All of your leave activities are documented, and paperwork is stored within the secure, cloud-based, proprietary tracking system. The system offers a self-service portal that allows different levels of access.
Read about how our leave management services helped this auto dealership group, then fill out the brief form below to get more information on this and our other HR services.
