Submitted by farmerf59 on
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My question is; how to encourage attendance at work when your organization has overly generous sick leave provisions.
I work in a large government department of 40,000, which has sick leave provisions of 18 days a year that can be accrued and rolled over with no upper limit. The current rolling average of sick leave taken per employee is variable across the organization, but averages about 16.5 days per year, per person. The work is mostly phone based contact with customers, and I am responsible for 8 directs, including 4 senior leaders, 4 technical support (no managerial responsibility) and 70 skips. happy to take any suggestions.
I think I might be missing something here...
Is your concern that staff might be seeing those 18 sick-days-per-year as an entitlement to be taken whether they are actually ill or not (that is, you're concerned that there's a culture of misusing sick days as paid leave)?
Presumably you do not think that staff should come to work if they truly are too sick to do so?
tough one here
I've worked at a place where this was an issue. I think this starts with conversations with individuals. Have the conversation about sicks days, are they (a) that sick days are 'free days' or (b) to be used for Dr's appointments, sick kids or personal illness, etc? Based upon the response, start having the conversations about sick days and their use. Be forewarned, there are some that will be put off by your attempt to "take" their sick days.
Sick days/Mental Health days vs Lying
I too work for a government with 18 sick days/year. My staff average 4 per year, parents of young children average a little higher - maybe 6-8. We have regular conversations about what sick days are for and what they are not. Example, if you have bronchitis, please stay home & don't infect the rest of us. If your stress level is so high you need a mani-pedi "me day" to cope with tomorrow, take it but do it quietly. No fair bragging about your "day off" to the rest of us. And, don't make a habit of it. If you do, I'm going to suggest you need to find a different job. To be fair, we aren't working with kids, people at risk or anything more stressful than your average corporation. If you do have unusually stressful conditions, YMMV.
I think it is about setting a standard and communicating that standard. Then, when people claim a sick day & you feel it is questionnable, have a conversation about truth telling and ethics. To me, taking sick days when you are not sick easily fits into the feedback model.
One of the things we remind our staff is that when you are sick, someone else is having to pick up the slack for you. We want you to take sick days when you are sick but they are also there for when you get a serious illness. I had a short-term doctor ordered sick leave (10 working days) and have never taken sick leave for granted since. All I had to do was lie still & get better. My family still had income & the bills got paid. I can't imagine being that sick & worrying about money. I relay that story regularly when trying to explain why it is good for the individual not to use as much sick time per year as possible.
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