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.