HR Pulse - Fall 2007 - (Page 46)

Technology drama By Gary Harbison Introduction Unscheduled absences can leave you panicking to fill an unexpected void. Managing absences and leaves scheduled or not, can be an administrative and legal nightmare. Additionally, not knowing and understanding the Family & Medical Leave Act (FMLA) regulations can prove very costly. An Illinois hospital was penalized with an $11.65 million judgment in favor of an employee who claimed the hospital placed him “between a rock and a hard place.” According to the lawsuit, the employee was forced to choose between his job and caring for his sick parents. Despite being an employee for 26 years, and being named “Employee of the Year” in 1999, the employee claimed the hospital established new arbitrary performance standards he could not meet while taking FMLA leave, such that he was subsequently fired. Concluding that his firing constituted intentional infliction of emotional distress, as well as a violation of the FMLA, the jury awarded him the following: • $750,000 in compensatory damages • $10 million in punitive damages • $200,000 in compensatory damages and $250,000 in punitive damages against the employee’s two supervisors. Enacted in the early nineties, the Family & Medical Leave Act is often misunderstood and difficult to manually administer, leaving employers open to absence abuse and legal risk. However, many forward-looking healthcare organizations have taken a proactive approach to FMLA leave administration. Take Huntington Hospital located in Pasadena, Calif. as an example. By employing an automated FMLA administration solution, they avoided numerous business headaches, improved productivity and saved money. Huntington’s HR executives recognized why compliance matters and accomplished compliance with an automated solution more effectively than they could have ever done so manually. Amid a deluge of state laws and overlapping federal regulations, California is tricky territory for healthcare organizations when navigating FMLA. “Manual compliance,” says Patti Bennett, director of human resources and benefits for Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, “would be overwhelming for virtually any HR department because it creates the major problem of no consistent tracking. With our new automated system all the tracking, including specific triggers is built in.” Other benefits delivered to Huntington by this automated system include helping executive management identify the actual utilization of leaves through its reporting capability, assisting with employee relations issues through consistency, automatically billing employees to collect insurance premiums (which had been difficult and cumbersome), and showing year-to-year history. Concludes Bennett, “With 99 percent of all the bells and whistles we looked for, our new automated system is so robust that even in its earliest stages it has exceeded our expectations.” Technology simplifies the entire task Why are more and more hospitals like Huntington moving from manual tedium to automated systems? A primary reason is that the daily deluge of paperwork presents quite a few complex FMLA tasks or challenges if handled manually. An automated system not only helps eliminate management problems caused by unplanned absences and FMLA leave, but also accomplishes several other key objectives alluded to by Huntington’s Bennett. It allows companies to better comply with complex regulations, therefore reducing the risk of potentially disruptive DOL investigations and expensive employee lawsuits. Additionally, it reduces costly administrative time required to manually navigate federal and state leave laws, along with the employer’s own leave and absence policies. And, toward preventing employee abuse of FMLA leave, it provides absence behavior analysis (which is permitted by the Department of Labor). Hospitals looking to streamline their FMLA tracking process through a software program are 46 HR Pulse Fall 2007

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of HR Pulse - Fall 2007

Contents Executive Director’s Letter President’s Message HR Leader Profile: Lisa McDaniel Spotlight on Community Citizenship Culture of Engagement How Transparent Should Healthcare Compensation Be? The Value of Assessment Testing in the Recruitment Process Technology Dramatically Changes FMLA Compliance Creating a Magnetic Culture™ Taking It to the Hill: An Advocacy Update 401(k) / 403(b) Fee Lawsuits – Are You the Next Target? Compensation Offers – A Better Process Find It Again Pulse Points Who, Why and Where Conference Highlights Schedule at a Glance Keynote Speakers Social Events Conference Sponsors Exhibitors Index to Advertisers

HR Pulse - Fall 2007

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