Hi Everyone,
I have been away from HR for a while now and I have recently moved to an organisation who have no HR in place.
I have inherited an employee who has been on LTS since Nov 18 with stress at work. I can see from the records that there was a request for medical records last year, which has not been received to date. Also from the records I can see that they employee has came into the office on a couple of occasions for wellbing visits and on these visits they have stated that it has nothing to do with work why they are absent. They have also mentioned on each visit that their GP would like for them to attend a councillior but the employee to date has not attended any visits.
This employee did originally go off sick the day after a wage increase was refused due to performance.
I have invited this employee into the office this Thursday for a chat so that I can get to meet her etc.
Any advice would be much appreciated on this case on how best I can it forward.
Replies
Hi Elaine,
Has the employee attended an occupational health review? If not, then I would certainly employ the services of an OH consultant and get a review set up asap. The assessor will be able to make professional observations about the employee's health and make suggestions for reasonable adjustments you could make to help get her back into work. The assessor may go so far as to say that, in their professional opinion, the employee will not be fit to return to work, or to this type of work, in the near future, and i believe you can then use that as potential grounds for capability dismissal, if you wish to go down that route.
However, I would say plan A is to get the employee back into work by dicussing reasonable adjustments- flexible hours, part-time working, working from home, moving to a different position, adjusting her duties, having a 'buddy' at work that shecan go to if shes' feeling overwhelmed, that sort of thing.
I'm not sure about the issue of the employee not attending counselling- I suppose you could argue that if she's not following medical advice, and not doing everything she can to get better, then why should your company continue employing her while she;s on indefinite sick leave? But perhaps there's a barrier to her seeking counselling- affordability, location, previous bad experience etc. Perhaps see if you can get to the bottom of that issue when you meet and consider if there is anything your company could do to help encourage her to go.
Best of luck,
Chrissy