Paola Mendoza

Absenteeism remains one of the biggest pain points for organizations today. The yearly cost of employee absenteeism has been estimated to exceed $600 billion1 in the U.S. alone, driven by lost productivity, temporary staffing expenses, overtime pay, and the administrative burden of managing unplanned leave. While some absenteeism is unavoidable, its growing frequency and impact signal a deeper challenge within modern workplaces.

Most organizations assume their disability accommodation processes are legally sound. Policies are in place, managers have been trained, and HR has handled requests before without incident. It feels like the system works—until a lawsuit proves otherwise.

While often not discussed, one of the main challenges with creating an integrated absence management program centers around certification requirements. While employers and claimants often ask for a simple unified claim form, the reality is that when you manage multiple benefits, they often have different certification requirements that make this difficult.

In our profession managing the disability cases of our employees and the impact to our organization, we are responsible for a successful outcome that supports our employees and advances the operational needs of our organization.

Organizations often attempt to track and monitor the health trends of their employees through regular and/or ad-hoc reports and spreadsheets. While this can be a useful way to see some overall trends, there is little customizability and can require ongoing work to maintain. In an effort to improve efficiency and utility, some organizations are opting to consolidate their data into health and productivity dashboards that provide nearly real-time data in a centralized visualization tool.

Severe weather is not just an environmental issue, impacting a few industries. Increasingly, it is a workplace issue—and not just where work is performed outside. As employers provide safe, hazard-free workplaces and training to prevent illnesses and injuries1, this responsibility is now expanding to include additional risks such as excessive heat, extreme cold, heavy precipitation, air quality, and diseases that can spread due to high temperatures and flooding.

DMEC’s job is to stay ahead of that curve and pull our members along with us. That means practical education grounded in what practitioners actually need, tools that work in real organizational environments, and a community where professionals can find both answers and each other.