‘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: Well, I think that is why the return-to-work interview is key, to be able to identify that. You might have suspicions about it because you might look at the pattern.

And before we came on, we were talking around the technology and the apps relating to sickness absence and the recording of holidays and absence. All of that really is beneficial. It's a management tool that you can look at and see where your problems are arising.

If there's a downturn in productivity, if departments are not as productive and not as profitable as they were, is it because that there is widespread absenteeism? What is the reason for that? Is it because you've got a toxic manager that is driving everybody out onto sickness leave? And do you need to deal with what the issue is?

I think that technology brings that around. The technology will help you spot the patterns also with the fakers.

My other position around that is that you need to be pressing them in relation to, at the return-to-work interview, whether it's the self-cert or whether it's a GP, but you need to be focusing on the medical evidence. Do not let employees get away through simple laziness or the fact that it's just becoming too much of a hassle to deal with to not complete their self-cert. That's their declaration as to why they're saying their absence has come around.

And if it is tummy bugs and vomiting and, "I'm not able to come in today because of that", and if there's a pattern of that happening, then are we at a point where we need to have Occupational Health come in and make some sort of assessment?

I think around that, it's really important to be prepared for your return-to-work interview. Don't just turn up with your pro forma. I think that you need to make sure that your chat that you're going to have is going to be . . . It has to be a confidential space for that to happen. You're talking about medical issues. You need to prepare your questions in advance, and you need to make sure that you know what support you can offer.

It's not a brow-beating exercise. It's not an exercise to catch the employee out or to enforce on them that they need to be in work. It's figuring out whether there's a genuineness to the absence or not. And I think that's how you will deal with the fakers.

I think if they are silly enough to put a video up online that you see as an HR because you're friends with them on Facebook . . . I'm probably showing my age there saying Facebook as well now. I think it's an old person's thing now, is it, Facebook?

But if they're silly enough to do that, or if they're tagged in photographs that you see and they've been sick for a week, but they're at a family party with a meal in front of them or a drink in their hand, that's going to actually raise suspicions. But you're entitled to ask about that.

Even if you have come across these things in social media and are a bit hesitant about saying anything, you can be open and frank and say, "This came my way. I didn't go looking for it. It came my way. It came up onto my platform. And you can naturally see the concern that this would arise within the business. What's the explanation of that? Is the nature of your illness that it only is a problem in the morning and not in the evening?" You're entitled to ask those sorts of questions.

Now, you need to do it in a way that is not harassing and that is not going to put you in the back foot, where the employee is going to rush off, stay on sick leave, and put in a grievance against you because they feel that you've been harassing them.

I think you need to be clear that you're coming at it from a business perspective and help the employee understand the reason as to why you're flagging it.