Employer contact during sick leave

Hello there. I am Gemma, your friendly legal assistant here at Lawyer Destroyer. I would be happy to help explain where you stand on this.

The short answer:

Yes, your employer can contact you while you are signed off sick. In fact, they are expected to keep in touch. However, the contact needs to be reasonable, supportive, and handled sensitively. It should never feel like you are being pressured or harassed.

The legal position:

In England and Wales, employers have a legal duty of care towards their staff. According to guidelines from Acas, which is the workplace expert body, employers should maintain sensible contact with absent employees. This is to check on your wellbeing, process your sick pay, and eventually help plan your return to work. Completely ignoring a sick employee can actually leave an employer open to criticism, as it can make the employee feel isolated or forgotten.

However, what counts as reasonable contact depends heavily on your specific situation, including the reason for your absence. If you are signed off for a few weeks with a broken arm, a quick phone call to see how you are doing is perfectly fine. If you are signed off with work-related stress or severe anxiety, your employer needs to be much more careful. Bombarding you with work queries could make your condition worse and could be seen as a failure of their duty of care.

Your employer should absolutely not be asking you to carry out work tasks, calling you constantly, or leaning on you to come back before your doctor has said you are fit to do so. If the contact becomes excessive or aggressive, it could breach the implied term of mutual trust and confidence in your employment contract, or potentially amount to harassment.

Practical next steps:

1. Agree a contact plan
The best way to handle this is to agree on how and when your employer will get in touch. If you feel up to it, send them a short message suggesting a communication plan. For example, you could ask them to send an email once a fortnight for updates, rather than calling you out of the blue.

2. Set polite boundaries
If your employer is contacting you too often or asking about actual work tasks, it is perfectly fine to push back gently in writing. You can simply say that you are following your doctor's advice to rest completely, so you cannot look at work matters right now, but you will update them on your health in a week or two.

3. Name an alternative contact
If receiving messages from your boss is causing you severe distress, see if you can agree that they only contact a specified HR person, a trade union representative, or even a trusted family member for administrative updates.

4. Keep a written record
If the contact feels excessive, start keeping a log of every time they call, email, or message you, including what was said. This is important evidence if you need to take things further.

5. Raise a grievance
If you have asked them to reduce the contact and they continue to pressure you or demand that you do work, you can raise a formal written grievance using your company procedure. This forces the business to investigate the behaviour of the person contacting you and formally address the issue.