Ease Leave Management with Technology and Outsourcing

While the legal requirements to provide employees with paid or unpaid leave for family and medical issues become more complex, the leave-management tools and services available to employers continue to expand.

Employers with the budget to do so are outsourcing—often to a single vendor—leave management tasks for the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and state and local leave ordinances, according to recently released findings from a survey of 1,203 employers conducted in 2017. Employers with the resources to manage leave internally are increasingly using technology to assist them.
Challenges continue to exist, especially in managing intermittent leave and the ADA, such as relying on managers and supervisors for leave enforcement and training them in the first place, the survey showed.

The 2017 DMEC Employer Leave Management Survey was sponsored by the San Diego-based Disability Management Employer Coalition (DMEC), a not-for-profit organization that provides education, resources and networking for absence- and disability-management professionals, and by Boston-based Spring Consulting Group, an advisory firm. Employers of all sizes were polled.