Mandatory comments on sickness absences

Hello ​@HRJoy ,

hope you're well! It's great to see you back in the Community 🎉

Thanks so much for your question! I checked this with our team internally, and I'm happy to share some background.

Mandatory comments aren't available for time off types in the sick leave category, and that's on purpose, for compliance reasons. In the main European markets where most of our customers are based, employers generally can't require employees to give a reason or details for a sickness absence. A required comment field would also be very likely to collect health data, which is strictly protected there. So it was decided to block this in the product to protect both your employees and your company.

Employees can of course still add optional comments to sick leave requests, and mandatory comments are available for all other time off types.

I hope this helps clarify the behaviour. We'd also love to hear more about your specific use case. If you're happy to share, feel free to tell us here, and please also submit it through the "Give feedback" feature in your Personio account. That way, your feedback goes straight to the right product team. 😊

Best,

Katharina

Hi Katharina,

Thanks for the response - I had a feeling it might be a EU GDPR compliance-related decision.

In the UK, employees can ‘self-certify’ sickness for up to 7 calendar days, and employers have the right to ask for a basic reason for the sickness absence (‘headache’, ‘cold/flu’ etc). For longer than 7 days, employees need to get a ‘Fit Note’ from their doctor or other approved provider, which then gives the basic reason for the absence and whether the employee may be fit for work and after what period.

We would like to be able to mandate comments on sickness absence requests so that we have a secure record of the reasons for employee sickness absences. We already ask employees or their line managers to add something in the Comment box when booking the leave, but it’s very easy to forget to do so, and then we have incomplete sickness absence records. The absence record can’t be edited once approved, which is sensible, but it means we have to ask the employee/line manager to delete and re-add the time off and include a comment, which wastes our and their time.

We have considered not using the ‘Sick’ category for this time off type, so we can use a time of type that allows mandatory comments, but that just means we then have incorrect time off type data.

It would be great to give Admins the ability to choose to make sickness absence time off types require mandatory comments - that way EU users can leave it turned off, but UK users could switch it on. I will submit this as Feedback. You have recently introduced country-specific time off elements when users set up new time off policies - could this not be one of those items?

Thanks - great to know that the comments can now be edited without deleting the whole entry; this update had completely passed me by!