‘Seamus Says’ boils down the best bits from Legal Island’s live ‘Employment Law at 11’ webinar into straight-talking takeaways you can actually use. 

Seamus: I think where an employee has a sick line that is saying that it's work-related stress, there is an obligation . . . My advice to a client would be that yes, you need to tread cautiously because the person is off sick. But if it's work-related stress, you need to get to the root cause of what the stress is being caused by and deal with it and tackle it.

So in the first instance, my advice would be that you're writing to the employee to acknowledge receipt of the sick line, that you're recording the fact that it is on the basis of work-related stress.

Often, you'll have an idea what the stress is. Not always. It could be that they've fallen out badly with a colleague and that's the result of it. Or maybe there's a problem in and around being overworked and they've maybe come and had that conversation with their manager or with HR.

But I think you're better recording to say that "We understand that this is a work-related stress matter", that the only way to resolve that is through communication and discussion. And they mightn't be fit to deal with that now, but you'd be trying to encourage them to deal with you as the employer, whether that's the manager or the HR adviser, to get to the bottom and see what resolution you can get in order to alleviate the stress.

Sometimes what an employee perceives as work-related stress is not work-related stress, and there are maybe other things going on in the background, or the problem is arising just from their own behaviour or their incompetence, and that has put the stress on. It's about keeping an open mind to the resolution of it.

But at the same time, there might be a cap in relation to what it is that you can and can't do. If the level of absence is sort of veering over the four weeks, I think that you're at the time certainly to call . . . What is long-term absence? I think, for me, it is somebody that is off . . . When you're getting up to past two weeks, into three weeks, into four weeks, certainly it's long-term absence.

You're looking then at, "Do we need to get Occupational Health support here? Do we need to have the employee attend with Occupational Health and share independently what the problems are?" Because often the employee will be much more open with Occupational Health than what they will be on a one-to-one basis with their manager or with HR. You need to keep an eye on that.

What I always say about Occupational Health is it's a great tool, it's a great resource, but it's costly. It costs money to get to get a report, and it's timely as well. By the time you get an appointment, and the time to have the appointment, and by the time the doctor or the Occupational Health specialist writes up the report and gets approval of it, it takes time.

I always think if you're going to ask for an Occupational Health report, don't just fill in the pro forma form. Ask the questions that you want specific answers to. It's one of my pet peeves, I have to say, whenever I look at the Occupational Health reports and it's all the standard box-ticking exercise. I don't think you get the value out of what you're paying for.

So, you have to be asking those key questions that you want answered for the specific circumstances that you have. And that should always be, "What can we do to support the employee back to work?"