An employee running out pf personal leave & still not returning to work can often be a challenging situation for a business to manage.  Today we are going to share a situation recently faced by one of our clients and how they navigated through which hopefully might help your business if you are facing a similar scenario.

Of course, if you feel that you would benefit from a Free HR consultation & strategic action plan to discuss the situation facing your business you can request one by visiting ondemandhr.com.au/advice.

• The employee had only been engaged with the business for 12 months
• They had exhausted all of their personal leave and advised the business that they were still unfit for work
• The business requested that the employee provide evidence to substantiate the personal leave
• The employee refused to provide any evidence and as a result, the business declined the ongoing personal leave request and placed the employee on unpaid leave
• The employee in this case ultimately decided to resign from her position.

However, the more challenging scenario would have been if the employee had not decided to resign.  In this case, the business would have been forced to try to engage the employee to discuss and negotiate their exit from the business.  Failing this, the business would have been forced to keep the employee on unpaid leave for 3 months before terminating their employment following due process for abandonment of employment.  This is because it would not have been a reasonable workplace directive to direct the employee to return to work under the assumption that they were sick.

So as you can see regardless of the size of the business, even when it comes to something as simple as personal leave, HR & Workplace Relations can put forward some challenging scenarios which if unresolved can lead to large and costly consequences.

If your business is faced with a challenging Personal Leave scenario or any other HR or Workplace Relations challenge then why not take advantage of a Free HR Consultation & strategic action plan by visiting ondemandhr.com.au/advice.

My name is Andrew Koleda, I am the Operations manager of On Demand HR and that’s all for this client story and looking forward to seeing you all in the next one.