The health and wellness of our communities is a high priority for park and recreation agencies and for NRPA, but the health and wellness of the people who are the driving force behind the scenes — your staff — should be a high priority as well. 

Attention to employee wellness might come naturally to people who work in the field of parks and recreation, but despite your best efforts, it’s inevitable that someone will fall off the wellness wagon. Most of the time it’s a cold and a couple of days off, but what if it’s a serious illness? Your first desire is that your employee just get better, but realistically you have to keep operations up and running as well. 

Warning: Soup is HOT!

Soup and sickness are the perfect partners, right? Who doesn’t appreciate a steaming bowl of chicken noodle when they’re under the weather? But if your employee has a serious health condition, it’s you who will get a bowl of steaming soup delivered — alphabet soup. Get ready for FMLA, HIPAA, FAQRSTUVWXYZ and a side order of several other scrambled letters that can be hot to handle.

FMLA: The Family Medical Leave Act

You will likely be relying on your Human Resources (HR) department to navigate the administration and compliance of the complexities of FMLA (and other related acronyms,) but managers need to know enough about employment regulations to know when they may apply, what the supervisor’s responsibilities and limits are, and what needs to get referred to HR. 

In brief, FMLA protects an employee’s job from loss or adverse effects of extended leave when he or she has to take time off to deal with a serious health condition (their own or that of a family member). As long as the employee meets the requirements (worked at least 1250 hours in the last 12 months and can document the condition and need for leave), then they are entitled to up to 12 weeks per year of medical leave. Of course, the sooner you refer an FMLA situation to your HR department, the sooner they can take over the details, qualifications and steps. The things that are critical for you to know are the things that come up between you and your employee long before the situation reaches HR.

Routine Sick Days or FMLA?

Unfortunately, there’s no simple formula to answer that — the devil’s in the details. Some employees are more than happy to give you all the unpleasant details of their ailment while others will just request the day off and mark it “sick.” If their situation qualifies for FMLA, however, then they are entitled to its protections even if they didn’t ask for it, want it or know it existed.

Suspicion = Obligation

It’s a common misconception that employees have to formally request FMLA in writing in order to trigger the employer’s obligation to take the appropriate steps. Not true. If your employee requests some time off to deal with a medical issue for either themself or a family member, they don’t even need to know the letters “FMLA” for your obligations to be triggered. The employee need only mention a qualifying condition for you to have a duty to investigate. 

While the legal requirements should be sufficient motivation, according to the employee medical management experts at Care Works USA, “If a supervisor has knowledge of a serious health condition, FMLA request or a potential FMLA qualifying event and does not take active measures to pass that information along to the appropriate party (in most cases, HR), the supervisor can be held personally liable for damages. (Shultz v. Advocate Health & Hospitals Corp.)” That’s right, personal liability, not just the employer’s. 

The Sky is Falling.... The Sky is Falling....

Of course, you don’t want to seem like a Chicken Little, discussing FMLA at every sneeze, cough or time-off request, so before you put on your Sherlock Holmes hat, ask yourself:

Has the employee met the 12 months/1250 hours requirement?

Has the employee missed three or more days for what seems to be related reasons?

If the answer is “no” to the first question, then FMLA is not going to apply. If it is “yes” to the first but “no” to the second, the employee is eligible but it’s unlikely that the situation is. If you answered “yes” to both, then you’ll want to get a little more information to determine if the situation could fall under FMLA before connecting the employee with HR.

TMI: Too Much Information

You need to ask questions that will help you to identify if FMLA might apply, but you don’t want to ask questions that cross a line into confidential health information (protected by HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), which could put yourself and the organization at risk. You don’t want to cut the employee off from sharing his or her deeply personal medical situation (you are genuinely concerned, after all) and come off as uncaring or dismissive, but it will be much easier to avoid breaching confidentiality and accidentally disclosing protected information if you don’t actually have that information. And when others ask you (and they will ask you), “What’s wrong with Paula?,” you need to have a safe but nonevasive answer. Perhaps something like, “Well, I’ll let Paula share the details, but what I can tell you is that we’re going to have to shift some things around for a few weeks, and I could use your help figuring out what that might look like” will send the right message.

FAQ: Functionally Asked Questions

“Steer clear of questions pertaining to the condition or specific reason someone is taking leave,” advises Care Works USA. “It is not advisable to ask what is wrong with an employee, or what they are seeing their doctor for.” It’s better to stick to more functional questions like, How much time do you expect to miss? What initiatives are you most concerned will be impacted? Are there things that only you do that others should get trained on? Staying focused on the information you’ll need to keep things running will help you avoid missteps into personal information that land you in hot legal soup. 

Soup Scrabble

There is a long list of Scrabble tiles (i.e., regulations and employment laws) that could be floating in that steamy workplace soup instead of, or in combination with, FMLA when you have an employee with a medical condition that impacts the workplace. Don’t let yourself get burned by ignoring the cues that there’s more to the story. 

Lauren Yost is NRPA’s Vice President of Operations.