The column below reflects the views of the author, and these opinions are neither endorsed nor supported by WisOpinion.com.

Picture a night-shift supervisor at a Wisconsin plant, or a charge nurse who has worked overnights at a regional hospital for nine years. This is a composite, but the pattern is common. She asks for time off for depression and exhaustion. Human resources handles it well: the forms go out on time, the certification comes back, the leave is approved. Twelve weeks later she returns to the same schedule, the same staffing gap and the same supervisor who never learned what happened. Six months after that, she quits.

Every box was checked. The person was still lost.

Wisconsin employers work under two leave laws at once. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act gives eligible employees up to 12 workweeks of job-protected leave in a 12-month period, and the U.S. Department of Labor states plainly that a serious health condition can include a mental health condition. Wisconsin’s own Family and Medical Leave Act adds up to two weeks a year for an employee’s own serious health condition, covers employers with at least 50 permanent employees, and reaches some part-time workers the federal law misses, because it requires 1,000 hours of work in the prior 52 weeks rather than the federal 1,250. When both apply, they run at the same time.

Those rules protect the job. Neither one says anything about whether the person comes back well.

A white paper my colleagues and I published, FMLA and Mental Health: An Employer’s Guide to Managing Leave, describes a mental health leave in four phases. The first is notice, when someone learns an absence may be coming. The second is designation, when the paperwork and federal deadlines cluster. The third is the absence itself. The fourth is reentry. Employers pour their attention into the second phase, because that is where the legal deadlines sit, and almost none into the fourth, which is where retention is actually decided.

Night-shift workers make the gap wider. People on overnight schedules sleep less, see less of their families and often have less contact with daytime managers who could notice them struggling. When they return from leave to the same rotation without a plan, the conditions that wore them down are waiting.

None of this requires new legislation to fix. Wisconsin employers can do four things now.

Plan the return when the leave begins. Decide who will be the employee’s single point of contact, what the first two weeks back will look like, and whether a schedule change is possible.

Keep supervisors out of medical details and in the plan. The person’s direct supervisor does not need a diagnosis. They do need to know the return date and what will be different.

Treat the overnight schedule as part of the problem. If a rotation contributed to the leave, a return to the identical rotation is a bet against your own employee.

Make sure care continues across the leave. Treatment that starts at the point of collapse and stops at the return date is how a good leave turns into a resignation. Many employees will not use a program they believe runs through their employer, so offering confidential outside options matters.

Wisconsin’s employers already do the hard compliance work. The next step is cheaper than replacing the person who walks out six months later: plan the part of the leave nobody is required to plan.

Martha Fernandez, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker and co-founder of CEREVITY, a private-pay concierge network of independent licensed clinicians. She is the author of Wired to Burn: A Therapist’s Guide for High Achievers Running on Fumes.