Making Personal Health a Priority: An Up-Close Look at the Impact of Medical Leave Policy
Work-life balance has been widely studied and discussed yet can still remain difficult to achieve. It’s often thought of as a balancing act between time spent on work tasks and family or household tasks, but as Liza Barnes, PhD, assistant professor of management, has explored, it can encompass much more.
“Not every person has a family they need to care for,” she says, “but everyone has a body, and sometimes your body tells you something’s seriously wrong.”
In a recent paper, “How Policy Implementation Impacts Employee Suffering at Work: An Exploration of Medical Leaves of Absence,” Barnes gathers and analyzes the experiences of workers who took time to address their physical or mental health.
The paper, published earlier this year in a special issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology highlighting research with social impact, draws from Barnes’ doctoral thesis at the University of Colorado, most notably qualitative data drawn from interviews.
“I was hearing lots of heartbreaking stories and was navigating it on my own, and it was hard for me to process by myself,” she says. “I was so motivated to continue this work, not only because I felt there was merit to it, but I felt such a responsibility to tell these people’s stories.”
With guidance and expertise from her co-authors — Christina N. Lacerenza, PhD, of University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business; and Ashley E. Hardin, PhD, of Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School — Barnes explores forms of suffering and compassion in the workplace and how policy adopted at federal, state and company levels can affect workers’ experiences.
She credits feedback from her Department of Management colleagues from when she first joined LeBow as a faculty member with moving the paper forward into its published form.
“Broadly, I’m interested in how organizations and managers can foster employees’ physical and mental well-being,” Barnes says. “The idea that we could take time away from work to heal hasn’t really been looked at in research, and a lot of people don’t know that the benefit exists.”
When some of the interviews turned up positive experiences for those taking leave, Barnes and her co-authors took interest and uncovered the importance of “leave coordinators”: specially-trained human resources professionals who are well-versed in company policy and tasked with implementation and compliance.
The paper also contains considerable policy recommendations at the federal, state and corporate levels, including advocacy for national paid-leave policy that goes beyond the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), federal legislation adopted in 1993, and for greater consistency between states and between employers.
“We found that employees at two different companies can both have access to paid leave, but their experiences can be totally different based on how the company implements policy and supports them — or doesn’t support them — through their leave,” Barnes says.
She adds she’s eager to explore how smaller companies handle medical leave; under FMLA, companies with fewer than 50 employees aren’t eligible, and many small firms don’t have internal HR departments.
As part of Barnes’ data-gathering, respondents shared intimate details about the personal difficulties they faced, both on the job and in their personal lives, in connection with both physical and mental health, including losing their identify or sense of self when they step back from their job role.
“These people were going through some of the hardest periods of their lives,” Barnes notes.
Those anecdotes included being fired while on leave, or returning to work only to be fired shortly thereafter. Barnes is now looking to explore these potential cases of employer retaliation in a future paper.
“Retaliation is more prevalent than I thought, and that’s a behavior that should be stopped,” she says. “We should try to understand why it happens in the first place so we can mitigate it.”
