A gallstone that needs holistic healing, accidentally getting on a plane, getting stuck in a blood pressure machine—employees can come up with the most incredible, out-of-the-box excuses for calling in sick. And while that may give them more time to tend to their plants and pets, and maybe even check out other jobs; for companies, it means losing big bucks.
High rates of sick leave cost companies billions of dollars and cause high levels of stress for co-workers. In order to curb increasing incidences of sick leave abuse, some organizations are now resorting to harsh measures, including firing employees and getting them arrested.
That important brainstorming session can be reason enough for your colleague to fake a sick day.
Over the past year, 28 percent of employees have taken a day off from work by faking an illness, according to a recent CareerBuilder study. The national survey, conducted online from August 11th to September 5th of this year, included a sample size of more than 5,000 workers, hiring managers, and human resource professionals across various sectors in the U.S.
The study says that not feeling like heading in to work (30 percent) or taking a day off for relaxing (29 percent) are the most common reasons for faking a sick day. Keeping up with a doctor’s appointment, catching up on sleep, and bad weather are the other reasons for calling in sick to work.
Although around half of the employees admitted that they had policies for Paid Time Off (PTO), 23 percent said that they still felt compelled to come up with fake excuses.
Organizations are coming up with strategies to check whether their employees are being truthful. Asking for a doctor’s note and calling the employee are the most common practices. A quarter of the surveyed managers disclose that they caught employees lying by tracking them on social media on their day off. Around 15 percent of the employers even drove by the employee’s house to find out whether the person was actually in.
The survey also points out that lying can have severe consequences. About 22 percent of the employees who were caught lying had been fired, like in the case of Jarrod Underwood. Underwood worked for Telus Communications in Alberta, Canada as a service technician and faked a sick day off to play a softball match. He was eventually caught by the suspicious boss who went to check on him during the game and was fired. Underwood’s worker union appealed against the termination, but the Alberta Court ruled in favor of Telus.
In another instance, a man in Bahrain was arrested in October of last year after being caught by the manager with a forged doctor’s note.
Managers overlooking medical certificates and forgetting to file them on time is one of the reasons why employees find it easy to abuse their sick leave policies. At the same time, businesses that are too strict in this regard risk invading privacy, creating litigious issues. Experts say that reviewing attendance records, discussing the “illness” with the employee, mandatory medical certificates, sick leave incentives and attendance awards, and a more company-specific PTO can help reduce instances of sick leave abuse.