An unwritten attendance policy across two Guelph companies

The situation

The letter gave seventeen days to respond. Budi owned two small companies out of Guelph, a home care staffing agency and an auto body shop, run under common ownership with shared administrative staff handling payroll and scheduling for both. The two businesses together generated combined revenue just topping $100,000, the kind of side venture that had grown into something real over several years without ever getting the formal policy infrastructure a larger company would have built in from the start. Neither company had a written attendance policy. Absences had always been handled the same informal way: an employee called in sick, a manager noted it on a shared spreadsheet, and if the pattern became disruptive enough, someone eventually had a conversation about it, usually in the hallway rather than in any documented form.

That informality had worked well enough for years, until it did not. Despina worked as a home care aide for the staffing side of the business, visiting clients in their homes across several routes that changed week to week depending on scheduling needs. She had a chronic health condition that caused periodic flare-ups, sometimes lasting a few days at a time, and her absences over the previous year had climbed noticeably as the condition worsened. A supervisor, working from nothing more than a mental tally of missed shifts and a general sense that she had become unreliable, eventually recommended her termination for excessive absenteeism. Budi signed off on it without asking whether the absences were connected to a disability, because the informal process had never included that question and nobody on staff had been trained to ask it.

Despina filed a human rights complaint within weeks, alleging she had been terminated because of a disability-related attendance pattern without any attempt to accommodate her. The complaint named both companies, because the shared ownership and shared administrative structure meant the two businesses could be treated as related employers for the purposes of the claim, a possibility Budi had never considered when running them as separate operations day to day. The response deadline was short, and Budi had never dealt with a proceeding like this before, arriving at our office visibly rattled by both the letter and the tone of it.

Complicating the picture further, Vartan, an auto body technician at the second company, had his own history of intermittent absences tied to an old workplace injury, managed under the same informal approach the staffing side had used with Despina. He had not been terminated and had not complained, but his file sat in the same vulnerable state hers had before her termination, a second version of the identical problem waiting to surface. Budi came to us needing an answer to the immediate complaint and, just as urgently, needing to know whether Vartan's situation was going to become the next version of the same problem while the first one was still unresolved.

What the law actually said

Ontario's human rights framework requires an employer to accommodate an employee's disability up to the point of undue hardship, and that duty applies directly to how attendance is managed. An employer is allowed to expect regular attendance and to manage a pattern of absences, but when the absences are connected to a disability, the employer has to turn its mind to whether accommodation, rather than discipline or termination, is the appropriate response. A policy, or in this case the absence of one, that treats every absence the same regardless of cause runs directly against that duty, no matter how reasonable the policy might otherwise look on its face.

The critical failure in Budi's process was not that Despina was let go for missing work. It was that nobody ever asked why she was missing work before deciding to terminate her. Once an employer has any reasonable basis to suspect an absence pattern might be connected to a disability, whether from a doctor's note, an employee's own disclosure, or simply the pattern itself becoming noticeably clustered or cyclical, the duty to inquire and consider accommodation is triggered. An informal system that jumps straight from missed shifts to a termination decision, without that inquiry ever happening, is exactly the kind of process that produces a viable complaint, and it produces one regardless of how well-intentioned the manager making the call actually was.

The shared ownership between the two companies mattered too. Related employer findings are not automatic, but where two businesses share ownership, management, and administrative functions the way Budi's did, sharing the same payroll system and the same person approving terminations across both, a decision-maker can treat them as a single employer for the purposes of a complaint, which meant the exposure was not limited to the staffing company where Despina worked. Vartan's situation at the auto body shop was legally relevant to Despina's complaint even though he had not raised anything himself, because it showed a pattern across the shared enterprise rather than an isolated lapse confined to one manager or one location.

None of this meant Despina's termination was automatically unlawful, and none of it meant the complaint would automatically succeed at a hearing if it ever reached one. It meant Budi's companies had no record showing that accommodation had ever been considered, which is the single hardest gap to explain after the fact to a decision-maker weighing whether the process was fair. The absence of a process is treated differently than a process that was followed imperfectly, and Budi's companies, for all their years in business, had the former rather than the latter.

What we did

1. Calendared the response deadline the day the file opened and worked backward from it. With seventeen days to respond, we could not wait for a full investigation before beginning to draft, so we started building the response framework immediately while gathering the underlying facts in parallel, rather than sequentially, to make sure nothing about the short window forced a rushed or defensive answer.
2. Reviewed Despina's actual attendance record and any medical information on file. We asked Budi to pull whatever documentation existed, which turned out to be sparse, a handful of informal notes and one doctor's note that had been placed in a file but never acted on or even read closely by anyone in management, which itself became an important fact shaping the response we could credibly give.
3. Advised Budi not to contest the core factual gap. Rather than argue that the termination process had been adequate, which the record plainly did not support, we recommended acknowledging the gap directly in the response and focusing on a proposed resolution, since a defensive posture against clear facts tends to prolong these complaints and often increases the eventual cost of resolving them.
4. Opened settlement discussions with Despina's representative before the response deadline expired. Early engagement signalled good faith to the human rights tribunal's intake process and gave us more control over the outcome than waiting for a formal hearing process to run its course over many months, which would have cost Budi far more in time and legal fees than an early resolution.
5. Drafted a written attendance management policy applicable to both companies. The new policy set out a clear step before any absence-related discipline: a documented inquiry into whether the absence pattern might be connected to a disability, with a defined accommodation process, applied consistently across both businesses given their shared ownership and shared administrative staff, rather than left to whichever manager happened to be handling a given file that week.
6. Reviewed Vartan's file under the new policy before any decision was made about him. This meant his intermittent absences were assessed under the accommodation framework rather than the old informal approach, and it meant the review happened proactively, before any manager reached for a termination decision the way one already had with Despina months earlier, closing the exact gap the complaint had exposed.
7. Trained the shared administrative staff on the new policy. Since the same people handled scheduling and attendance tracking for both companies, a single training session closed the gap that had allowed the informal approach to persist across both businesses for years, walking staff through exactly what to document and when to escalate a concern rather than act on it alone.
8. Set a review date to confirm the policy was actually being followed. Rather than treat the new policy as a document to file away, we scheduled a check-in with Budi three months out to confirm attendance decisions were being routed through the new process, since a policy that exists on paper but is ignored in practice offers no real protection.

The outcome

The complaint settled before it reached a hearing, with Budi's companies paying Despina an amount in the mid five figures and agreeing to the policy changes as part of the settlement terms. That figure reflected the strength of the gap in the record, not a fixed formula, and it was higher than it likely would have been had the original process included even a basic inquiry into her health before the termination decision was made. The settlement also included a confirmation that the new attendance policy would apply going forward, giving Despina's representative something concrete beyond the payment itself.

The termination itself was not reversed. Despina did not return to her position, and the settlement did not include reinstatement, which was never realistically on the table once the working relationship had broken down over the months leading up to the complaint. The outcome limited the damage rather than undoing it, and Budi was clear-eyed that the cost, both financial and in terms of the disruption to the business over those weeks, was the direct result of a process that should have existed years earlier, long before Despina's file ever became a problem.

Vartan's file did not turn into a second complaint. Under the new policy, his intermittent absences were formally assessed and a light accommodation was put in place, adjusted scheduling around his injury flare-ups, and he remained employed without incident afterward, with the whole review documented in a way the old informal system never would have produced. Budi later said the training session for the administrative staff was the part of the file that mattered most going forward, since it was the one piece that changed how the next situation, whenever it arose, would actually be handled from the first missed shift rather than the last one, and the follow-up review three months later confirmed the new process was actually being used rather than quietly ignored once the pressure of the complaint had passed.

What you can learn from this