The employer’s guide to sickness absences

Return to work meetings

Return to work (RTW) meetings should be held with employees once they have returned to work after any sickness absence.

This is even after one day of absence. They can also help deter employees from faking illnesses.

In the meeting employers should discuss:

• Why the employee was absent.
• How they are feeling now they are back at work.
• Is there anything you can do to assist their continued attendance at work.
• Any other issues such as notifying the employee of how much absence they have left on the company monitoring system before it becomes an issue.

Return-to-work meetings can overturn employer absence requirements to make acceptable changes for certain employees under the Equality Act 2010.

For example, this meeting could be used to discuss amendments for disabled employees. This could be because their GP believes their working environment needs to be adjusted to lessen absences.

Employers have a duty of care to make reasonable adjustments. If they are not reasonable you do not need to take them.

Presenteeism

Presenteeism is when an employee turns up to work ill when they should have been absent. Although it might promote sickness absence, it’s important employers encourage genuine sickness absence in a reasonable way.

Sick employees have negative effects on the workplace. These include factors such as:

• It takes longer for the employee to become well again.
• It spreads illness throughout the workplace.
• It lowers ill employees’ productivity when carrying out their work.

What can employers do with false sickness absence?

Once you have investigated the sickness absence and have good evidence that the employee’s sickness was false, you can discipline them.

You could withhold pay over and above the Statutory Sick Pay (SSP). This is subject to whether you have a company sick pay scheme and what the terms are within this scheme.

Disciplinaries could also be given because of frequent absences. Your disciplinary procedures and absence monitoring systems should make this clear.

It should also be obvious what absence level or trigger this will occur at. Frequent single days of absence will likely result in quicker disciplinary action than long periods of sickness.

It can seem harsh when you take disciplinary action against an employee. Even more so when they are genuinely sick.

However, you don’t want to encourage an absenteeism working environment.

Employers will likely need to make reasonable adjustments to trigger points or disciplinary action if the sickness absence is because of a disability. This is because disabled employees do not see any unfavourable treatment in comparison to others.

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