Leave of absence compliance; all organizations strive for it, and yet so few are able to achieve it with much certainty. Even fewer can do so at scale.
Why is that?
Why is it so complicated for HR teams to administer a leave of absence in accordance with the law every time a leave request pops up?
A single leave of absence has numerous sources of compliance risk that must be addressed to ensure your organization is protected from itself. With trends like increasing Mental Health leaves, and leave requests overall, leave management is becoming an increasingly large focal point for leadership teams looking to shore up compliance gaps.
Compliance Risks Associated With a Leave of Absence
There are several points along a leave of absence journey where compliance confidence can go sideways. Run a quick self-audit of how your process could be exposing your organization to risk (it’s okay, you aren’t alone!) by asking yourself the following questions:
Laws and regulations: Are you adhering to federal, state, and local regulations such as FMLA, ADA, USERRA, etc…?
Company policies: Are your policies non-compliant, outdated, or inconsistently applied?
Documentation: Are manual processes leading to inadequate leave tracking, improper handling of medical certs and sensitive information, or improperly documenting leave requests and approvals?
Communication and training: Are managers educated on the do’s and don’ts of leave? Do employees clearly understand your leave process and their rights and responsibilities?
Return-to-work plan: Do employees returning to work have reasonable accommodations? Are return-to-work arrangements handled inconsistently or are employees returning to a different position than they had when they left?
Discrimination claims: Are employees facing retaliation or discrimination for taking leave or are there discriminatory practices in place (based on protected characteristics) that could lead to a discrimination claim?
If you asked yourself those questions and said “Oh [redacted]…we’re in trouble,” it’s okay.
The follow-up question is, then, how can HR leaders ensure that their organization remains compliant as employees continue to disperse and leave requests rise?
Tilt Recap: With the complexity of a single leave of absence, it’s nearly impossible for HR teams today to remain compliant at scale. HR teams can’t be successful when relying on manually updating spreadsheets, storing sensitive documents in rogue email threads or hard drives (or shared drives), and working with outdated systems that don’t have the sophistication to navigate the intricacy of leaves of absence.
Replace Manual LOA Processes with Automation
When we think of automation in HR, our minds tend to drift to all the time technology can save overworked People Teams and all of the administrative busywork that gets taken off our plate.
Modern leave management services should leverage automation to do exactly that, but with LOAs, automation can do so much more for an organization than simplify leaves for employees and remove burdens from HR.
From creating accurate and compliant leave plans to automating payroll to continually tracking leave usage, automation is as much about paving your path toward compliance as it is a super tool for effective leave of absence management.
Perhaps most importantly, this compliance and administrative relief can be achieved even as your organization scales and leave requests rise.
Store All Leave Information Under One Secure Digital Roof
When an employee takes a leave of absence it’s often due to a significant life event that occurs outside of office hours.
The personal nature of a leave is compounded by the fact that there is sensitive information being exchanged between the employee and the employer.
Your leave management solution should remove any risk of sensitive information falling into the wrong hands, medical certifications being lost, or data being overwritten or lost somewhere on a hard drive.
Ensuring your leave data is securely stored in one platform, and not in email threads, shared drives or personal hard drives, will give your organization the assurance that your employees’ sensitive information stays private and remains private.
Educate Employees On All Things Leave
Leaves of absence are complex, even for HR professionals, so imagine how confusing it is for your employee population at large.
Your best bet for compliance at scale is to educate employees on everything from your policies to rights and responsibilities to protocols for requesting and returning from leave.
Compliance as it pertains to leaves of absence often feels like it’s the sole responsibility of HR, and in some organizations it is. This is why when a recent Reddit thread asked HR leaders “What’s your HR hot take, especially regarding managers?” the top reply was:
The more educated your entire employee population is on all things leave, the better chance you have of not running into compliance issues. When your entire organization is on the same page and understands the importance of compliance and how to achieve it you set yourself up for success.
While it’s important to educate all employees, managers are the leading cause of workplace violations and thus need some extra attention that your current process might not be able to accommodate.
Keep Managers Informed Throughout the Leave Journey
The best way to guarantee that managers won’t muck up your leave of absence compliance efforts is to walk up to your nearest wishing well, drop a quarter in and wish that no employee ever needs to take a leave of absence.
Since wishing wells are hard to come by these days (seriously…where’d they all go?), your next best bet is educating them on the do’s and don’ts of leave, of course, and giving them real-time insight into their specific employees’ leaves.
This will ensure that managers are updated on leave start and stop dates, the protections their employees have, and detailed information on the specific leave type their employee is taking.
Further, inform your managers on best practices for reintegration so when employees come back into the fold they don’t feel retaliated against (i.e. coming back to a lesser position than they had when they left), and they aren’t overwhelmed trying to readjust to work life.
This is becoming increasingly difficult for HR teams to facilitate in-house as employees disperse, leave laws evolve, and leave requests increase.
Rely on Leave Law Experts
Just as managers shouldn’t be expected to successfully navigate the ins and outs of a direct report’s leave of absence on their own, HR shouldn’t be relied upon to be experts on leave laws.
This is particularly important to those organizations who have employees scattered across the country where different state or local regulations must be adhered to.
Leave laws are complex, evolving and always expanding. On a recent episode of From the Ground Up, Tilt’s CEO Jen Henderson recently explained why it’s so difficult for HR leaders to keep up.
“All 13 states with paid family leave have stood up their programs a little differently,” Jen explains. “So even if you become a subject matter expert and understand how to navigate California paid leave, that is not a copy-paste for how New York is doing it, or Washington, or Colorado, etc…That enormously increases the expectation of competence and understanding of this space within HR.”
When it comes to evaluating leave management services for your organization, they should have leave law experts in-house to ensure your organization is always adhering to the latest laws and to make sure you aren’t getting “leave law advice” from a Google search ever again.
Tilt Recap: Replacing manual processes with automation, educating employees and managers, securing your leave data and staying up to date with the law takes a tremendous level of effort and is vitally important to keeping your organization compliant and out of legal hot water.
Leave Software That Delivers Compliance At Scale
Modern leave of absence technology can aid in complying with legal requirements by automating and simplifying the tracking and documentation of employee information while administering consistent leaves to employees.
With secure digital record-keeping, employee education, leave law expertise and automated tracking and payroll calculations, the right leave management software will reduce the risk of manual errors, oversights, and non-compliance, while also offering a dependable audit trail for regulatory purposes.
With so many moving parts to a single leave of absence it’s so easy to get it wrong.
“It’s very easy to get leave of absence wrong,” adds Jen. “Not only from ‘What are you eligible for,’ but also, ‘What is the pay component?’ ‘What is the job protection component?’ Suffice it to say, the opportunities to step out of compliance are enormous. One of the main reasons that employers are looking for an outsourced solution is that they recognize and often have experienced the consequences of doing it wrong.”
Tilt’s leave management solution provides employees with comprehensive leave plans that are consistently applied no matter the leave type, no matter the state. Further, every leave plan is built in accordance with the latest leave laws and regulations you must adhere to thanks to a team of in-house leave law experts who live and breathe all things leave.
Tilt not only guides employees through their leave journey with empathy (thanks to 1-1 human support from Leave Success Managers, AKA Empathy Warriors), but Tilt also syncs with your HRIS and leverages automation so you can be certain your leave data is accurate and up-to-date.
Data security is something not to be taken lightly, which is why Tilt built its platform with your Legal and Compliance team in mind. Achieving SOC 2 Type II compliance means that your sensitive data is always safe and secure. (Read more about our data security measures here).
When an employee takes a leave using Tilt, their manager is also given access to Tilt. With user access controls their manager will only see what they need to see, but are kept in the loop and educated on best practices throughout the leave journey to ensure HR, the employee and their manager are all in lockstep.
All of this allows Tilt to support you and your organization at scale. You can’t predict whether you’ll have one leave of absence request this month or 30, but implementing a leave management solution means you won’t have to worry about team bandwidth, employee support or compliance ever again.
Tilt Recap: Not all leave management services are alike. A solution like Tilt factors in scalability with compliance confidence. Automation keeps your leave data current, and Tilt’s security measures keeps your organization out of legal hot water. From in-house leave law experts to a holistic foundation for supporting your employees through their most significant life moments, relying on Tilt for leave law compliance has never been simpler.
About Tilt
Tilt is leading the charge in all things leave of absence management through easy-to-use tech and human touch. Since 2017, our proprietary platform and Empathy Warriors have been helping customers make leave not suck by eliminating administrative burdens, keeping companies compliant, and providing a truly positive and supportive leave of absence experience for their people.
