Author: Hannah Gilchrist
Date: 01/02/2010
Brace yourselves, today is national sickie day. No, not in this office - everyone is in fact in attendance here - but nationwide.
In case you haven’t realised this already, today, 1 February is when statistics suggest employees are most likely to call in sick at a cost of £30 billion to the UK economy.
But judging by the likelihood that most of today’s illnesses will be faux should employers be keeping checks on how workers report absent days? The actual notion of ‘phoning-in sick’ is becoming a thing of the past with many opting for texts or emails.
Peter Mooney, head of consultancy at the Employment Law Advisory Service (ELAS), believes that many employees are using emails or texts to report illnesses and so requires more employer-employee trust. ‘The traditional phone call was always a way for bosses to decipher whether staff members were bluffing or genuinely ill,’ he said.
When 350,000 people are predicted to call in sick today, and with statistics revealing that only 50 per cent of managers believe employees who complain when they are ill, it is clear that trusting your employees is becoming harder.