Compassionate Return-to-Work Strategies

Previously published as Compassionate Return-to-Work Strategies: A Leadership Guide for Sustainable Employee Reintegration by Sarah Scahill.

Every organization measures recruiting, retention, and rewards. Almost none measures the moment that decides all three: the return.

Every year, your best people leave for a while. Illness. Injury. A new baby. A dying parent. A loss that rearranges everything. Whether they truly come back - engaged, productive, and still with you a year later - is decided in the weeks after they walk back in.

Most organizations leave that moment to chance. This book ends that.

Drawing on a career spanning frontline nursing, disability management, and senior HR leadership, Sarah Scahill delivers the complete architecture of a successful return - legally sound, evidence-based, and unmistakably human.

Inside this fully revised and expanded second edition:

• The five Supreme Court of Canada decisions every leader should know - explained in plain language, with the real awards employers have paid for getting it wrong
• A six-step planning process that satisfies tribunals and people alike, including exactly what medical information you may and may not collect
• Accommodation design that finds work others miss - and where "undue hardship" is actually drawn
• Conversation guidance for the moments leaders dread, plus three ready-to-use scripts
• NEW - Part III: Every Return Matters. Parental returns, caregiving returns, bereavement and pregnancy loss, domestic violence leave, and long personal absences. The returns nobody else writes about.
• Measurement, policy, and culture tools - including a one-page reintegration scorecard and policy checklist
• A quick-reference chart of Alberta's job-protected leaves, current to 2026, plus a worksheet for mapping any jurisdiction

Written for HR professionals, disability and case managers, executives, supervisors, wellness consultants, and small business owners navigating their first medical leave - in organizations of ten or ten thousand.

Grounded in Alberta and Canadian law, with a built-in guide for readers in other provinces, the United States, and beyond.

Because every return is a reintegration - and every reintegration is a test your organization is either passing or failing right now.