"Family and Medical Leave Act"
Mary Elizabeth Burke
Society for Human Resources Management, April 2003.
According to a survey conducted by the Society for Human Resources Management, a majority of companies provide job-protected leave above and beyond what is required by the Family and Medical Leave Act. Fifty-nine percent of respondents reported offering job-protected leave beyond FMLA requirements and 63 percent said that their companies make exceptions to required FMLA leave policies in order to provide their employees with more flexibility. According to the respondents, the most common way of dealing with employees on leave was to reassign their work to other workers, followed by the hiring of temporary replacements, allowing some work to go undone and putting some projects on hold until the absent employees returned. Fifty-two percent of respondents reported approving leave requests that they believed to be illegitimate, though the interpretation of what constituted a legitimate request was left to up to the respondent. Conversely, a significant yet considerably smaller portion of the sample (35 percent) was aware of employee complaints about a co-worker’s use of FMLA leave. The survey was based on the responses of 377 human resources professionals and is a follow up to a previous study conducted in 2000.
