Capability issues - Performance or sickness? (long)

[UnderTheDome]

I'm an employer (NCd for this thread) and would appreciate some help please.

I have an employee who's had a quite a number of short term self certified absences this year. After his last period of absence we had a back to work meeting and discussed the reasons. He informed me (for the first time) that he has an ongoing health issue, which can be kept under control by sensible eating etc. I asked if there were any reasonable adjustments needed and was told there were none.

He was back at work for a few weeks then took another 2 days off (self certified). I planned to instigate the company's formal policy on repeated absence but before I had chance to arrange a meeting he failed to carry out 4 significant areas of his role all within a week.

I decided to put the sickness absence to one side and deal with the performance issues so wrote to him and gave 5 working days notice to attend an investigation meeting to discuss each of the four areas, details of which I set out in the letter.

The day before the meeting he went off sick and phoned in to ask a colleague to let me know he wouldn't be attending the meeting.

He's now been off a week and sent word he won't be in the rest of this week so I'm waiting for a doctor's note to come in.

My questions are:

1. can I still proceed with rescheduling the meeting?

1. should I now include the repeated absences or will this cloud the issue?

If this all gets too complicated I'll seek formal HR advice but a steer from anyone here would be appreciated.

thanks.

1. Yes you can reschedule

1. I personally wouldn't and would do as you have done and see them as separate issues, happy to stand corrected though.

Is there a company policy for phoning in sick? We have to speak to a manger 30 minutes before our shift starts.

I would reschedule and I would keep the issues separate.
As an employer I would take some professional advice before the meeting so you don't make any big mistakes and then follow up with advice after the meeting to ensure you have all your ducks in a row.

We always try to keep absence and performance as seperate issues, and yes you can reschedule.

Do you not have a company doctors that you can refer him to? We would do this if someone was having recurrent short term absences for the same/similar reason.

Thanks for your advice everyone. Looks like I'm on the right track.
I'll be taking some formal advice this week to make sure all bases are covered before I reschedule the meeting.

We do have the relevant policies and procedures in place and he manages to 'just' stay within them. But the problem I have is the poor performance overshadowed the absence issue and needed immediate action.

Thanks again.