Hi, my name's Candice Elliot, and I am a Human Resources Strategist. Today, I'm going to be talking about administering medical leave. I'm going to be focusing just on companies with less than 50 employees and the best practices for administering leave. I'm not going through all of the steps that are required for administering family and medical leave through FMLA. The reason for that is because it's really complicated.
I am going to be providing all of those directions to you in the notes for this lesson. Of course, if you need assistance with that, I'm available to help. I just want to help you if you are not required to administer FMLA leave but you have maybe someone who-- a broken arm, or maybe someone has to have treatment for cancer, or maybe you have a pregnant employee, and you want to follow those first steps towards administering leave.
The first best practice is to request a leave of absence request from your employee. This is a standard template form that I'm going to be including for you. It lists the dates of the leave, so when they want to be gone from work for, and then the type of leave that they're requesting. If that's a personal leave, or a medical leave, or some type of maternity or paternity leave, it'll just say that on the leave of absence request form.
Once you've received that form, then, you'll want to check to see if [00:02:00] they qualify for whatever kind of leave they've asked for. If they're asking for paternity leave and they haven't had a child or haven't adopted or fostered a child, then they wouldn't qualify for that kind of leave. You're just making sure that what they're requesting is something that they qualify for. If they are requesting FMLA leave and you're a company with under 50 employees, then they wouldn't qualify for that kind of leave, but they may qualify for other types of leave.
The next step is to provide a notice to the employee letting them know that you've received their leave of absence request and to ask them to provide a certification from their healthcare provider. A certification from the healthcare provider lets you know that there is actually a medical reason why this employee is unable to be at work. It's basically just a verification from the medical provider. The certification of a serious health condition or this note from the doctor should include the dates that the person would be gone from work and when they would be able to return to work to their full capacity.
When you are requesting this certification from the healthcare provider, you want to be sure to include a copy of the person's job description so that the doctor knows what their job entails. If it's a really physical job, then they need to know that to be able to certify that the person can return to work.
Once you've received this certification from the healthcare provider, it's best to provide what's called a designation notice. The designation notice tells the employee that you're approving or disapproving the leave, [00:04:00] the dates that you are approving the leave for if that's the direction that you're going, and also any other requirements that you may have.
You might require an employee to use any accrued paid time off or any sick leave prior to taking any unpaid time off. You may require the employee to have a certification from their doctor in order to return to work. This is important in really physical work environments especially. You can have other types of requirements, such as requiring the employee to check in with you at certain specified amounts of time.
I definitely recommend that if you have someone on medical leave, that you want to check in every month until it gets closer to the time that they're supposed to come back to work. Then, you would want to check in around every two weeks, and then weekly up until they are actually returned to work.
Sometimes, it can require flexibility to bring someone back to work after they have had a medical leave of absence. Sometimes, employees can come back to work sooner than you think. Sometimes, employees require extra time to heal. When I'm administering medical leave, especially if it's a pregnancy disability leave, I try to be cognizant of all of the changes that are happening in this person's life, that they're getting used to a new way of living. A lot of times, if they've been dealing with a very serious injury that's kept them out of work, that it is a transition for them to shift out of work and then for them to shift back into work [00:06:00] again.
I think those are all of the things. I'm going to be providing you with the leave of absence request form, a certification of healthcare provider, a template designation notice. It's important to remember that if you're administering these kinds of leave, you just want to administer them the same way regardless of the employee. You don't want to treat one employee differently than another employee.
When you're administering a medical leave of absence, this will be your new system, and then, you'll use this every time the medical leave comes on for you. I hope that's helpful. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions. See you soon.
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