Sick leave privacy: who should see why someone is off

“Where is he today?” is asked in every office, every week. The polite answer and the lawful answer are not the same thing: the reason a person is away is health data, and health data is one of the most protected categories in European law.

What the law actually says

Under the GDPR, health information is “special category” data (Article 9): processing it requires a specific legal basis, and the guiding principle is minimisation - collect only what the purpose demands. For an employer the purpose is to run the workplace, and that demands two facts: the person is absent, and until when. The diagnosis is not needed for that purpose - so, as a rule, the employer should not be collecting it.

Some countries go further: in the Netherlands, for instance, an employer may not ask about the nature of an illness at all - assessing fitness for work is the job of the occupational physician. Ukraine’s electronic sick notes follow the same logic: the employer sees the fact and the period, not the medical details.

The three circles of visibility

Inside a team the question is not only what the company knows - it is who sees it. A sane policy has three circles:

• The person - sees everything of their own: history, balances, documents;
• The manager and whoever approves requests - see the real type and the dates, because they plan the work and carry the responsibility;
• Colleagues - need exactly one thing: the person is away and until when. “Away until Friday” answers every legitimate question a teammate has.

Notice what the third circle does not contain: the word “sick”. Whether someone is on holiday, at a funeral or in a hospital is simply not the team’s business - and a system that shows colleagues a generic “another type of absence” protects the person without hiding the schedule.

Why a spreadsheet fails at this by design

A shared file has exactly two states. Either everyone with the link sees every row - including the column that says “sick leave” next to a name, which is precisely the disclosure the law frowns on. Or the file is locked down to one keeper - and then nobody, including the managers who need it, can see who is available this week. There is no middle: a spreadsheet cannot show different people different things.

This is the quiet cousin of the problems we described in the article on where spreadsheets break: most of them show up as extra work, but this one shows up as a privacy incident waiting for its day.

A rule worth writing down

Whatever tool you use, put the policy on paper: who sees the type of an absence, who sees only the fact, and who approves. Best of all is when the tool enforces the circles by construction - so privacy does not depend on somebody remembering to configure it.