Building a leave administration process and reviewing the policies behind it
A single employee leave could trigger three overlapping programs at once, federal FMLA, state paid family leave, and internal PTO, each with its own policy written at a different time and never reconciled with the others. The fix needed two different things to actually work: one unified process, and a document-by-document review honest enough to say which policies were still correct.
Category
HR process design and policy review.
What I was trying to accomplish
One operational process for handling employee leave that could trigger three overlapping programs at once, federal FMLA, state paid family leave, and internal PTO, plus a check of whether the underlying policy documents still matched current rules.
The data challenges
Policies and forms written at different times for each program, loaded together into one project, and telling current regulatory materials apart from outdated versions that looked equally official.
The result
A four-phase process, awareness, intake, active leave, return, with a linked checklist and flowchart, and a document-by-document review sorted into clear next steps: revise, replace, update figures, retain, or refer to counsel, keeping roles and escalation paths consistent even after the process owner changed mid-project.
Technical details
Tools: claude.ai Projects
Employers in states with paid family leave can face three overlapping leave programs at once. The firm had policies and forms for each, written at different times, and no single process for handling a leave that triggered more than one.
The inputs were the employee manual, benefits guides, state employer toolkits from several years, and federal leave forms, all loaded into a claude.ai Project. Claude helped design a four-phase framework and produced three linked deliverables: a process document, a per-case checklist, and a flowchart. In a separate session, Claude searched the project document by document and sorted findings into priority tiers.
The outputs were the process package and a written document-by-document review with a prioritized action list, referring anything involving legal interpretation to counsel. The practical challenges were keeping roles and escalation paths consistent across three documents when the process owner changed after the first draft was delivered, and telling current regulatory materials apart from outdated versions that looked equally official.
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Let's talk through where things stand, and where they could go.