Has anybody out there had problems with intermittent leave? HR manager Barbara Dahlen asked. Her audience’s response at the recent SHRM Annual Convention and Exposition in New Orleans was loud and long. “Oh, yes!”
It took her a couple of years to figure things out, she says. “You can’t fix intermittent [leave] abuse overnight. But it will get fixed if you stick with it.” She added that she is not a lawyer, and she “doesn’t play one on TV.” But she does have a handle on intermittent leave. (Dahlen works at Bellefontaine Habilitation Center in St. Louis.)
Statistics Show Dramatic Improvement
Statistics show that her systems work, but they are not particularly “employee friendly,” Dahlen says. “I’m not the most popular person at the facility,” she admits.
But there is one group that really likes what she’s doing, she says—the other employees who have been picking up the slack for the intermittent leave abusers.
Record of Improvement
Dahlen is proud of her accomplishments, as shown in the chart below.
| Number of Hours of Intermittent Leave Taken |
| 2005 | 12,195 |
| 2006 | 7,488 |
| 2007 | 6,154 |
| 2008 through Oct.* | 2,209 |
| (*Dahlen switched jobs in 2008.) |
She has people who treat FMLA as a game. They think eventually you’ll forget and they’ll get away with it, she says. So you have to have lots of patience, you have to devote a lot of time, and you have to have executive leadership who will listen to employees complain about you and who will stand strong.
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Medical Case Manager
Dahlen says that it is essential to have a nurse case manager or someone with a medical background to review certifications. She runs all her “certs” by the medical professional for review. “This employee has uncontrolled asthma, needs to miss 8 days a month. Does that sound right to you?”
That’s a reasonable question, says Dahlen. “If my nurse case manager says no, I send for a second opinion.” Get this in your budget, she says. Her nurse case manager costs from $1,000 to $2,500 a month.
Get the Most Value
Dahlen offers the following tips for dealing with FMLA:
Require employees to burn paid time. The faster you burn it, the faster you solve your attendance problems. For example, Dahlen says, a lot of people have 40-hours-per-week restrictions. That’s tough in a manufacturing environment where you’re working people 60 hours a week. But one thing you can do is to charge to FMLA the extra hours they are scheduled to work but don’t, or an extra day they are scheduled to work but don’t. “That is a good way to burn up FMLA,” Dahlen says.
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Build an on-call workforce. Start to develop a casual, part-time, or on-call workforce. When people don’t come in, you bring in your on-call people. That’s much cheaper than overtime, Dahlen says.
If they come in long enough, eventually they have the skills. When you have an opening, you can move them to full-time status. “All my new hires came that route in my last job,” Dahlen says.
No moonlighting policy. Dahlen noted that she has nurses who are out on FMLA and working as temporary nurses for other organizations. There’s nothing she can do now, as her new company has no policy, but she’s working on that.
Use credible surveillance when necessary. If you have good reason to think that an employee is falsifying an injury, it’s time for surveillance. But it needs to be credible. You don’t go sit in front of their house, Dahlen says. You hire a surveillance company, an independent third party.
Have the surveillance party go out and on two or three separate occasions. You want to show a consistent pattern of abuse. Make sure to get videotape, not pictures. Videotape shows moving, bending, and stretching, etc. Pictures just don’t show that, Dahlen says.
Since it’s $600-$800 a day, don’t do surveillance unless you’re pretty sure you have a violator. For example, another employee says, “Bob’s working at this construction site across town.”
Is It a Lot of Work?
Yes, it is a lot of work, Dahlen admits. But once you get set up and figure it out, it comes fairly easily. Set up templates for everything, and you’ll make it easier, she concludes.
In tomorrow’s Advisor, we’ll see Dahlen’s tips for dealing with pattern absences, and we’ll take a look at a unique program that has been updated to include all the new FMLA compliance requirements.