Employment Law: Common Conundrums

Sickness Absences

I have a number of employees who have short term intermittent sickness absence on a Friday before a bank holiday Monday etc. At what point can I or should I start addressing this as a disciplinary matter?

There are a number of different formulations for identifying short term intermittent sickness absence, the most common of which is the 'Bradford Score'. This is designed to highlight and manage frequent short term absences and is based on a calculation over a rolling period of the number of times a person is absent multiplied by the number of times a person is absent multiplied by the total number of days of absence. An example would be an employee who was off in January for two days, in February for one day and in March for 6 days. The total number of absences is 3 and the total number of days of absence is 9. Their Bradford score therefore would be 3 x 3 x 10 = 90.