HR Management & Compliance

Employers Ready for New FMLA Rules?

This content was originally published in April 2009. For the latest FMLA regulation changes, visit our FMLA article archives or try our practical FMLA compliance guide.

According to a 2009 poll on BLR’s websites, Compensation.BLR.com and HR.BLR.com, 74% of employers said that their organization was ready to comply with the new Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) regulations.

The poll, conducted in early January 2009, asked respondents whether their organization would be ready by the January 16 deadline to comply with the new FMLA rules. In the poll, which included 225 respondents, only 10% of respondents said their organization wouldn’t be ready by the January 16 deadline. The remaining respondents (16%) said their organization isn’t covered by the FMLA.

However, when BLR asked employers about the FMLA 1 month later, in early February 2009, fewer than one-third of employers said that they had actually communicated the changes to the FMLA to employees.

In the February 2009 poll, 40% of respondents said they hadn’t communicated the FMLA changes to employees. Another 32% said that while they haven’t communicated the changes yet, they plan to do so. And 28% of respondents said they had already communicated the FMLA changes to employees.

The new FMLA regulations require that employers give all employees general notice by posting FMLA notices in the workplace and that employers include FMLA notices in handbooks or policies generally distributed to employees.

If employers do not have handbooks or policies, they must distribute FMLA notices to new employees at the time of hire.

So, while employers responding to the polls believed that they are ready to comply with the new FMLA rules, they had not yet taken the first steps toward compliance with the new rules.

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