Since 1 January 2026, every Belgian employer must include a structured contact procedure for sick employees in their work regulations. By this point, the following should already be in place: who makes contact, when it happens, how it is documented and how reintegration is followed up. With this, the easy part is already behind you. You must also be able to demonstrate that you are complying with your own procedure.
Most organizations track their contact moments in a shared file or over email. That seems to work, until you have to rely on it. There are no mandatory fields, so every case is filled in differently and the result depends on the manager. You cannot spot patterns in absenteeism, because free text does not lend itself to analysis. And during a social inspection it is hard to show that the procedure was followed consistently.
What actually works best in practice is to place the entries in structured environment. With a simple low-code app, for example with Microsoft Power Apps, those responsible can log a contact moment in just a few clicks.
Since every interaction is automatically linked to the employee’s personnel file, along with a timestamp and the person who performed the action, you can easily reconstruct the exact timeline afterward.
This is where it gets interesting. Once the data is structured, you can run analyses on it. You see which departments stand out, whether contact moments are taking place within the agreed timeframe, and where reintegration stalls. Insight thus becomes a byproduct of a process you have to set up anyway.
The obligation forces you to record something. Do it in a structured way instead of in a file, and you gain insight into your absenteeism on top of being able to prove you follow the procedure.
This is regulation 2 of 3. Want the EU Pay Transparency Directive and the EU AI Act too, including how to tackle them with a single data foundation?