Good Morning, What are best practices around offering benefits to employees while they are out on short-term disability and/or FMLA? My specific question is around the employee portion of the premiums. When an employee is on Disability and/or FMLA, the company is not issuing them a paycheck, which also means that the company is not withholding deductions (employee portion of premium in this case). The company has been paying for both the employer and employee portion so far. I'd like to know what the best course of action is in this case. Do you send the employee a payment plan wherein you withhold deductions for the unpaid period once they are back on payroll? Is the employer required to cover for the employee portion while the employee is on disability/FMLA? Our Employee Handbook doesn't call out any of this, hence I am reaching out for best practices so we can incorporate it going forward. Thank you.
Benefits during Short-term Disability
Answers
These are the questions you should ask...... What are your company VALUES and what CULTURE you want to have? How do you want to treat (or value) your employees and how much DOLLAR figure are you willing (or capacity) to attach to those??
The answers to these questions should DICTATE orl guide you on YOUR policies be it "best practice" (what others are doing) or not. It should be what is best for YOUR COMPANY and YOUR EMPLOYEES.
To a large extent, I (emphasis, as it is a personal opinion) would say, damn what other companies do. Companies VALUE their employees differently. If your company values tell you to should shoulder the (extra) expense....then so be it. If your company values will make you DIFFERENT (give more or less benefits) from other companies....then so be it.
Just my .02 cents.
As a P.S., the problem with these sort of specific "best practice" questions is that they do NOT account for the total package (benefits included) afforded the employees.
For example, I can say that we do NOT shoulder the aforementioned expense but you have to take into account that our salary rates are 150% above industry. It also does NOT account for what the employees or company value. For example, employees or the company may have NOT chosen to shoulder this specific expense but chose to have a continuing education subsidy.
This goes back to my initial answer..... what are your company values, how do you want to treat the employees.....and most importantly, how much $$ do you want to attach to show those values. The rest is just apportioning the total benefits pie to reflect what are important to the employees and/or company.