Is it possible to “lean” your leave or absence management programs under FMLA, workers’ compensation, vacation and PTO time?
Editor’s comment: We saw a very solid article in Business Insurance magazine that is required reading for HR, benefits, workers’ compensation and safety folks across the U.S. Please don’t take our word C for it, look yourself at http://www.businessinsurance.com/article/20090726/ISSUE01/307269992.
Their focus was to applaud and focus on efforts by Boeing Corporation to look at every step of their leave processes and distill them down to the bare minimum. Boeing’s leave management programs underwent the process beginning in 2007 because of patent inefficiencies. The company with 147,000 employees previously administered eleven different, complex leave programs and its workers generated 59,000 intermittent FMLA absences annually and 16,000 non-FMLA absences. Their managers felt poor administration of those cases was costing millions of dollars and lost productivity.
Employees and managers were very dissatisfied with the complexity of the cumbersome leave management administration. They moved all of them to one main site and administration. The overall management focus was then to revisit and “reinvent” every aspect of every leave request to see if it could be made more efficient. That required examining minutiae of every step in various leave processes to find improvement opportunities. It also allowed establishing an integrated and centrally managed absence-management program.
Boeing teamed with its group disability provider to obtain short and long-term disability support. They worked together to implement a current map of its leave processes. The process required a painstaking look where they mapped out every process, every person involved, every single transaction, every system, and every handoff. From the article, it appears to be a win-win situation for everyone involved from top management to the line workers.
We don’t see why this same process couldn’t be applied to workers comp leave—we feel it would bring definition to a hard to define process. If any of our readers are doing so, please send a reply.
