Q: Can I require an employee to provide a Doctors excuse when they call off work for a sickness/injury?
I have an employee that doesn't communicate very well (just doesn't show up) and calls in sick very frequently. Can I start requesting a doctor's excuse for these sick days? He's a bit difficult to deal with and we want to make sure we are correct before confronting him with it. I have documented every time he has done it.
A:
You can do this, however, you should ensure that you are not singling this employee out. If you have an employee handbook you should consider updating the handbook to ensure that this policy is applied to all of your employees and not a single employee. If you do not have an employee handbook you should still make sure that you are creating a new policy so that this particular employee cannot allege that you somehow discriminated against them by only requiring them to provide documentation.
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