FML Percentage Usage

jitrbug

Our management has long contended that the percentage of FML usage at our company is very high. From time to time I have done a very informal poll by calling several companies in our area to see what their average percentage is running. This would include employees they currently have out on leave or employees with certification on file for intermittent use for the current 12-month period. It does not get into hours used, only headcount of users. I have never been able to find any survey information on a local or national basis that stated what the average ratio of employee population vs FML leave information is (as indicated above). Our current usage is running 9.1% on an employee population of 1350. In the past this number has been between 12-15% but I have no idea if that is high or not on a national level. Does anyone know where I can find this information so I can tell management if we are average or above average on our FML usage? If there is no survey information available on this, could we get a survey done here?

System

Interesting question. I'll try to use it as a weekly poll question in our HR Hero Line e-zine.

James Sokolowski
HRhero.com

jitrbug

>Interesting question. I'll try to use it as a
>weekly poll question in our HR Hero Line e-zine.
>
>James Sokolowski
>HRhero.com

jitrbug

Thanks, that would be a great help...I'm tired of getting battered for our percentage when I don't know if it is good or bad! I have some in management (outside of HR) that seem to think we encourage employees to get FMLA coverage. Of course, these are the same ones that don't attend our management training classes on FMLA!Thanks for your help.

jrzgrl

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 12-14-05 AT 10:06AM (CST)[/font][br][br]Are all 1350 of your employees eligible? We have a total of 375 employees, but to figure out this year's percentage I would include only those who had been here for over a year and are regular employees (we wouldn't put an On-Call EE on FMLA, for instance). We're at 6.6% this year. You're doing better than us with an eligible population of 286.

jitrbug

That's a good point but the way our management is looking at it is how many people they have here and working! They don't care who is are is not eligible. They get concerned/anxious with the FMLA's because of the potential of having someone out for 12 weeks, whether all at once or intermittant. They don't get as concerned with those that have not been here the year since they would only have 7 sick days available to them. What they are looking at is they have xx% of their employees out or with the potential of being out because of FMLA certification on file.
Of course to them, that equates to a high number of people not here and thus work not getting done. We have very low turnover here so if you look at those that have been here a year, it would knock out no more than 100 headcount for any current 12-month period. Because of that and for simplicity we just look at the population as a whole when we are asked for the information. Aside from the one year requirement, all of our employees would be eligible. We don't have any positions that would not be eligible.

VS

I would love to have that info as well. I did alot of searching through various sites, etc. and could not find any data regarding FMLA usage. We have 5500 employees and all of our Leaves of Absence combined are at 10-11%, with the majority being FMLA. I haven't broken that number out yet to see how much is FMLA only.

jitrbug

After my inquiry this was put out as a HRHero weekly poll several weeks ago so you can find the info in the archive.

VS

Thanks, I will check it out!