What is a Return to Work Form and why is it important?
Return to work forms are an important part of managing attendance throughout your business, helping you to gather information about why employees were absent and if they require any support in reintegrating.
Return to work forms should be used to record the outcome of the informal return to work meeting that is held when the employee comes back and should be completed after every absence regardless of how long an employee was off and the reason for their absence.
Return to work forms and meetings can help you:
- Bring returning employees up to speed with any changes that may have occurred during their absence.
- Develop an effective return to work plan for employees ensuring they are supported during their reintegration.
- Identify any underlying health concerns that should be addressed.
- Monitor absences, spot trends, and deter your employees from pulling bogus absences.
- Detect whether the absence was triggered by a work-related issue, such as work-related stress.
How to create your own Return to Work Form.
When planning to design to your return to work form you first need to consider all the crucial information you will want to capture using the form.
Think about all the key pieces of information you must record about an employee’s absence during their return to work interview to ensure the procedure and information about the absence has been thoroughly and correctly documented.
We recommend separating your form into two separate sections like our free template which you can download below.
The first section should be completed by the employee so that they can detail the absence.
You’ll want to include fields to capture individual details about the specific employee returning to work such as their name and the department they work in.
Next, you should include fields to collect important information about the absence, such as who it was reported to, how many days they were off for, and give the employee the opportunity to detail the reason for their absence.
Be sure to include fields in this section to capture the employee’s signature and date to establish that the information they have provided is correct.
The next section should be completed by the line manager and should be used to capture information about the return to work meeting that was held.
You should include fields to record important information, such as the date the informal return to work meeting was held, a summary of the discussion, and any actions including timescales that were agreed upon to help support the employees return to work.
As remember to include fields to capture the managers signature and date to establish the information they have provided is correct.
Using Jomo247 to manage your HR processes and procedures.
Moving your HR management system online will help your business seamlessly migrate to a paperless workflow which will prevent your important documents being lost whilst also improving your environmental impact and cutting costs.
Once important documentation like your return to work forms have been completed, they are automatically stored in your system on the cloud and can be quickly accessed by those with the right permissions, wherever you may be.
With our roles and permissions features you can control who has access to what documentation ensuring your employees data remains protected and confidential.
With our seamless version control, all updates to your HR processes and procedures can be stored and used to evidence your commitment to improving your business whilst also ensuring all your employees are kept up to date.
With our tagging feature you can easily reference all the relevant HR documentation to make locating it on that all important audit day as stress free as possible.
For more of our free compliance templates, click here.
