Absence management

There’s never going to be a situation where you have no staff absences. It’s important to remember that most employees feel bad about letting down their colleagues.

Yet absences for any reason can be tricky for your business. More so if you don’t have policies in place for managing them.

You need to know why staff are away from work, when they’ll back and how you’ll deal with:

  • Short-tern sickness lasting less than a week.
  • Repeated short-term sickness. These may follow a pattern.
  • Long-term sickness absence lasting several weeks or more.
  • Unauthorised absences not sickness related.


Return to work interviews

As an employer, you’re required to acknowledge and discuss an employee’s sick absence with them when they come back to work.

In most cases this needs only to be an informal thing with a brief note on the employees record to record that you undertook it.

In situations where sickness is frequent or a pattern is evident then a different approach is needed. In such circumstances, you’ll need to conduct a structured RTW (return to work) interview.

Both of these formats are good practice in terms of supporting your employee and identify any ways in which you can help.

Go Legal HR will give you all the advice and support you need with your RTW interviews.