A Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Checklist: The 11 Essential Elements

It’s rare that employment law stories get play in the mainstream media, but the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) has made the jump. The network news shows, USA Today, and other major media have all done stories on it.

The reason: the current debate over revising the law, to remove the potential for abuse (if you listen to one side), or to expand its benefits up to and including paid leave (if you listen to the other).

All this ruckus is likely to lead to confusion, which makes it a good time to get back to basics and make sure your current policy complies with the law as it is. HR Daily Advisor’s sister publication, Best Practices in HR, recently did just that by publishing an “FMLA Policy Checkup” … a checklist of what your leave policy must contain to comply with the law, and how to use it to everyone’s best advantage.

Checklists can keep all your HR policies in line. Make sure they are with BLR’s exclusive HR Audits Checklist program. Click here to learn more.

Here’s what your policy should include. See if it does:

–Notice that FMLA leave is limited to 12 weeks.

–Requirement that employees work for your company for at least 12 months, and 1,250 hours in the year prior to leave, to be eligible. (Note that courts have ruled that employment need not be continuous. A car salesman who worked only 7 months, but who had previously worked for the dealer 5 years before, was deemed eligible.)

–Indication that intermittent leave is permissible, as long as management is reasonably notified.

–Identification of what a “serious health condition” is. FMLA defines it as a condition resulting in more than 3 consecutive days of incapacity and treatment by a healthcare professional.

–Latitude to transfer an employee to an equivalently paid spot in the organization where FMLA leave is less disruptive to operations.

–A ban on discrimination in granting FMLA leave.

–Requirements for medical certification, any reports that must be filed when on leave, and any fitness-for-duty certification that must be supplied before returning to work.

–Rules on who pays for the employees’ continued health and/or benefits coverage while on leave.

–Your right to require (or their right to decide) that they use up paid time off, such as sick or vacation days, before FMLA leave begins to be counted.

–Their right to return to the job left, or one equivalent to it (with one exception, noted below), as long as all policy conditions are met.

Keep line managers in line on hiring, discipline, FLSA issues, and more, with HR Audit Checklists. To learn more, or to try the program at no cost for 30 days, Click here!

–Notice of the “key employee” provision in the law that allows you to deny reemployment of certain highly paid employees whose presence is deemed crucial to the company, provided they are told they run this risk when they ask for FMLA, and that the decision on whether to reemploy them is not made until the end of the leave.

For additional FMLA and many more vital HR checklists, we recommend you check out BLR’s exclusive HR Audit Checklists program. You can try it at no risk or cost by clicking here.

Make Sure You Don’t Forget …
… all the legalities in administering HR. Make sure your managers don’t either. Keep everyone on track with BLR’s HR Audit Checklists. It’s a ton of reproducible checklists for virtually everything essential in HR. Try it on us for 30 days. Read more.