Long-Term Sickness Meeting Questions

Businesses have a lot to deal with on a daily basis. As an employer and business owner, it’s imperative to ensure that you are well-equipped and in the best position possible to deal with long-term sickness meeting questions. Long-term sickness among employees can affect productivity but as an employer, you should be careful with how you approach it.

Typically, a long-term sickness absence from an employee is defined as a period of four or more weeks. Absence may be due to a number of reasons with some of the most common reasons for long-term absence being unexpected illnesses, chronic conditions, or planned operations. A formal procedure should be followed with compassion towards your employee which helps you gain a much better understanding of how it impacts the employee’s ability to work.

Stages To Handle Long-Term Sickness Absence

Step 1: Absence Meeting – The first absence meeting is normally conducted at least four weeks after an absence and where there is no plan for immediate return. Although the absence meeting is important, you should be flexible in your approach and allow for Zoom meetings if the employee can’t make it to the office due to sickness. This is a formal meeting discussing your employee’s current situation and potential return but they do have a right to be accompanied by a loved one or friend in this meeting.

Step 2: Note-Taking During Meeting – Taking notes during the meeting is essential as proof that you are following a fair process on behalf of the employee. All notes should meet the dialogue of exactly what the employee has stated during the interview. It’s also recommended to follow up in writing, keeping your own copy of them, and also to send a copy to the employee so both have proof of the meeting on record.

Step 3: Outline The Impact Of Employee’s Absence – An employee’s long-term absence will have a considerable effect on your business and bottom line, especially if you are a smaller or local-type business. For example, if you are paying for additional resources or employee cover, as well as paying for the employee’s absence, this could be hitting you hard. It’s essential that you document the business impact of the employee’s absence.

Step 4: Seek Further Medical Information – You should go about this step very carefully and sensitively. It may be worth asking your individual employee if they can provide further medical information regarding their sickness and situation. As an employer, this will give you a much better idea and put you in the picture. Healthcare professionals will be in a much better position to give timescales of when the employee may be expected to a full return to work. For this step, it’s essential that you ask the employee to retrieve this information and that you DO NOT retrieve it without permission.

Step 5: Absence Meeting 2

After you have followed the formal procedure and all of the above, the next stage of long-term sickness absence is to arrange a second-stage absence meeting. The second stage absence meeting normally occurs around one month after the initial absence meeting. This meeting should review where the employee currently stands in terms of health and returning to work. At this point, further information may have been retrieved such as medical records that should be discussed. A few of these meetings may be conducted for the foreseeable to maintain communication with the employee.

Step 6: Formal Meeting – This stage of the process normally happens around 3-6 months from when your employee was absent but can be longer than this or shorter in some cases. This formal meeting is conducted when progress hasn’t been made with communication. At this stage, the business may be suffering majorly financially and you may have to decide – with the evidence collected – whether to terminate the employment on health grounds.

Sickness Absence Review Meeting Questions

Long-term sickness meeting questions should be clearly outlined and asked during absence meeting stage 1. At this stage, you have been made aware that an employee is facing long-term sickness absence and you’ll want to collect a set of questions that find the balance between getting the answers you need and also being empathetic towards your employee’s current set of circumstances and issues.

Here are just a few typical questions to ask as an employer or manager;-

• How are you doing/how are you keeping?

• Is there anything we can do to support you at the minute?

• Is there any possibility of working from home part-time/full-time?

• Are there any medical reports that you have received so far?

• Could you return to work if we made the relevant adjustments you require?

• Is there a likely date you are expected to return?

• We are looking to arrange a few meetings to keep up to date. Are you happy with this?

• Would you consider redeployment?

Special Considerations

Pregnancy & Disability

Pregnancy and disability should be treated with extra care as these are special cases. As an employer, it’s important to treat pregnancy and disability as special cases to avoid the risk of a discrimination claim from the employee. Another special case where the procedure will be different is where the employee has a terminal issue. You should be careful with these cases and ensure that you follow the right procedures.

Contact NORi HR & Employment Law

Are you dealing with a long-term sickness absence? It’s important that you follow the right procedure and ask the right long-term sickness meeting questions. If you need our professionalism and expertise to best manage this, we would love to hear from you. Get in touch with our team by calling us directly on 01254 947829.

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