Hi

I wonder if anyone can help me with a kind of 'personnel' question please?

My manager recently sent an email to everyone in our department, with a list of all our sickness records for the last 4 years. She didn't mention the reasons for the sick leave, it was just a total of how many days each person had been absent over that time period. Needless to say, it caused quite a stir! Everybody could see how much sick leave everyone else had had, and for at least the next hour it was the main topic of conversation, with several unpleasant 'comments' made about people who had had an above average amount of leave.

I'm just wondering if there is a confidentiality issue here with her releasing this information? As I said, she didn't mention anything about the types of illness/sickness, but was it right for her to share the above figures at all? She says that she'll be speaking individually to the people who have had above average leave, but wouldn't it have been better to email them privately, rather than sharing the information with the whole department? Her reason for sending the email is that staff sickness is something that affects everyone, so she felt we should all know about the sickness levels (which are quite a lot higher than they should be).

I could probably contact the personnel dept where I work to find out about this, but as it's now the weekend I just wondered if I could find anything out in the meantime. Does anyone know where we stand with this, or is there a website with this kind of information on? I've done a quick google search but I'm not sure where to start.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks