Through the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), certain employees are entitled to 12 work weeks of unpaid leave under specific medical or family circumstances, such as parental leave or a serious health condition. In some cases, employees eligible under FMLA take their 12 weeks of leave all at once. However, FMLA does not require leave to be used in a single block. Employees with qualifying circumstances may take their allotted leave in smaller increments that amount to as much as 12 work weeks over a 12-month period—but this “intermittent leave” can cause numerous headaches for employers. It’s important for employers to understand how intermittent leave works and how to best handle its effects in the workplace.

In the day-to-day rush of business, it’s easy to overlook key employment issues, but they have a way of turning into true headaches for HR professionals. Below are five HR matters that have a habit of becoming bigger problems for employers, and if you aren’t paying attention to them, you may be putting the business at serious risk.

FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act) retaliation law expanded in 2017 – about the size of a cat’s paw, which, in this instance, is pretty big. “Cat’s paw” here describes a situation where someone other than an employment decision-maker convinces (or dupes) the decision-maker to take an adverse employment action against another employee. (For those unfamiliar with the phrase, “cat’s paw” is derived from a fable wherein a monkey tricks a cat into pulling roasted chestnuts out of a fire for it to eat, burning the cat’s paws in the process. The phrase is used to describe situations where one person is unwittingly used by another for the other’s purposes.) When this is done with retaliatory intent, is the employer then liable under FMLA for retaliation? The answer, according to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals (this federal circuit covers Kentucky), is “yes” in the case of Marshall v. Rawlings.