Sick Leave Legislation in Norway and Sweden: What You Need to Know and How WorkForce Software Can Help

Sick leave legislation in Norway and Sweden contains nuanced rules around self-declaration and when a doctor’s note is needed to get sick pay. These rules can be complex and time-consuming to manage manually and prone to errors that lead to inaccurate payroll and government reporting. We’ll discuss the impact of these legislations on businesses in Norway and Sweden, and how WorkForce Software can help organisations to manage sick leave more efficiently and compliantly.

1. About the legislation

Norway: Sick leave regulations in Norway have very specific rules around sick absence self-declared and when a doctor’s note is needed to get sick pay. These rules do often require manual review of historic data and monitoring of dates for both employees and administrators.

Sweden: Swedish sick leave legislation has several rules for paid/unpaid, company paid sick leave and government sick leave. There is a rule that the first 20% of a regular work week is unpaid absence when sick, then company payment takes over. There is a threshold for when a doctor’s note is needed and one for when the sick leave pay goes over to government paid sick leave.

2. Why does this legislation matter?

Norway: Accurately reporting sick absences is important for being in sync with the government systems and processes, and for keeping payroll accuracy for employees with sick absence(s).

Sweden: The calculations can be rather difficult, and in some cases require a link between payroll and time solutions because of premiums that might be applicable even when sick. Payroll accuracy and government reporting is important in these cases and can be very costly when manual processes are involved. Each new case of sickness has this rule, and there are specific rules as to when a sick absence is considered a new case

3. Who is impacted by the legislation?

Norway: Employees will see clearly how and why pay items for sick absences appear through payroll and timesheets. Administrators will benefit from reduced manual work with absence rules for sickness. Payroll accuracy and avoiding retroactive changes and government reporting issues.

Sweden: Time and payroll administrators and employees alike will see similar benefits as Sweden enforces similar legislation that will reduce errors and increase payroll visibility.

4. What does the impact look like?

Norway: WorkForce Software can be used to validate absence codes and create warnings when deadlines/thresholds are approaching, both in timesheets and through the Hub/Assistant.

Sweden: WorkForce software will automatically detect a new case of sickness and apply the rules for paid and unpaid sickness and sick premiums, based on either time or payment, or both. The unique capabilities of our WorkForce Management Solution are that we can perform the monetary calculations directly as part of the time calculation, so there’s no need to process payroll before the result is visible to administrators (and, if desired, employees).

5. What do industry specific use cases look like?

Norway: This legislation is not industry specific, but different companies might have different legislation options, which we can accommodate in our templates.

Sweden: Similarly, this legislation not industry specific, but there might be different calculation methods for white/blue collar, salaried, monthly paid and hourly paid workers (or occasional workers, etc.).

6. How can the WorkForce Suite help?

Norway: Our solution will create messages and warnings to ensure accuracy. This is done by applying our templates for Norway, and any company specific handling/processing is easily managed up through our powerful rules engine.

Sweden: Our solution will monitor absence rules and apply correct pay codes for employees, ensuring correct pay and correct reporting to government. All this can be done using a combination of the country specific templates as a base and our powerful rules engine to tailor the solution to each company’s specific requirements

7. What are the challenges/penalties of doing nothing?

These new legislations can cause complicated processes and often complex interfacing between payroll and time systems. Without a system that provides good support to accommodate region specific compliance, administrators may see an increased amount of manual work to check the eligibility for the absence code entered. Further, an increase in the need for manual review likely leads to more errors that can prove quite costly over time.

WorkForce Software can help organisations in Norway and Sweden to manage sick leave more efficiently and compliantly by automating the process of validating absence codes, warning of approaching deadlines and applying the correct pay codes. This can help to reduce manual work, improve payroll accuracy and avoid costly errors in government reporting.

The WorkForce Suite offers Universal Compliance that covers every labour law or agreement, letting you comply with confidence.