Do you call in and talk to an actual person or a machine?
-Nope. Email or text message to the boss and coworkers.
Is it a difficult process?
-Nope. No detailed excuses needed, a simple “not feeling well”.
How many days can you be sick before you need a doctors excuse?
-I think after 3 days in a row there’s a policy where you could be asked for one, but I’ve never heard it happening. I think it’s just there to prevent abuse in rare cases. If a serious sickness more than 10 days, we can go on unpaid leave-of-absence without excuse also (for example, to care for a family member).
You’ve piqued my curiosity. I sense that you are making a specific distinction (is that redundant?) by saying you are a college lecturer. What distinction are you making? Does that mean you don’t work for a specific college? Does this just means you haven’t reached tenure? I’m curious. Thanks.
OK, here’s where I really want to add some related side info to the OP’s question. I’ll get into that in a bit.
First of all the answer is that I simply let my boss know that I’m sick. No big deal.
The more detailed answer is this based on a couple of particulars about my job.
I can work from home pretty much anytime I want. So if I’m sick I don’t necessarily have to call in. I just work from home.
My company doesn’t give sick time and they don’t give vacation time. It’s all rolled in to “Paid Time Off.” If I have to take a day off work it doesn’t matter if I’m sick or not, it comes out of the same pool.
Even when I’m on a true paid-time-off day, I end up checking my email, answering work related questions, etc. etc. So in a sense, I’m rarely off work except when I go to a destination vacation away from phone service.
So here’s where I wanted to add on to the OP’s question. My last 3 jobs, spanning over 15 years, have all moved to the model of “Paid Time Off.” No vacation, no sick time. You get x number of days, which increases at various intervals. I was actually surprised that more posts above mine (any?) didn’t seem to have the same situation. In addition to the OP’s question, I’d like to know what your company’s policy is regarding sick time/vacation/paid time off.
Government employee here. We’ve got all different buckets of time off - everything from sick to personal to vacation to floating holidays to comp time. And each bucket has different rules*. If I’m calling in sick or taking other unscheduled leave, I must actually communicate with my supervisor. Generally email is fine, but I do need to ensure that it was actually seen (which means I send the email before business hours and call if there is no reply to the email) I need a doctor’s note if I am out sick for five days or more - but I get a note whenever I go to the doctor, even if I miss fewer than 5 days. Because there is an attendance policy (which doesn’t bother me, because it’s reasonable) and one of the provisions is that any continuous absence with medical documentation is a single occasion of unscheduled absence, whether you are out for one day or six months.
Personal days expire on your anniversary when you get 5 more, but lose any left from last year. Vacation accruals must be below 300 hours on a specific day each year or you stop accruing- but only the balance on that date matters- you can exceed 300 hours on the other 364 days of the year. Holiday leave expires on the same holiday in the year after it was earned , so the leave i will earn on Election Day 2015 must be used before Election Day 2016. Each bucket also has different treatment for the time left in them at retirement - for example, I’ll be paid a lump sum for up to 30 days of vacation when I retire. Anything over 30 days , I will have to run out by remaining on the payroll .I 'll have to remain on the payroll to exhaust any personal, holiday or comp time. Whatever sick time I have in the bank is converted to a dollar amount based on my salary and life expectancy at retirement. And that dollar amount is credited toward my share of my health insurance premium in retirement.
Side topic:
I think this is an important point. A person should try to accumulate at least 6 months time off because eventually we all seem to have one of those long term illnesses or injuries that keep us out of work for several months and can put a person into debt.
I email or IM my boss. He’s usually traveling somewhere, so no biggie.
I actually worked from home today because I was too sick to go in to work, but not sick enough to be bedridden. I was trying to spare my coworkers the sound of me horking up a lung.
Higher Education/State University
8 hours a month sick leave that can accumulate for the entire length of employment. You can trade a certain amount in towards your retirement.
8 hours a month vacation to start. That bumps up two hours a month every five years. At 25 years, I earn 17 hours of vacation a month. That’s four weeks and 1 day. This accumulates to a certain point. Like six weeks to two months of leave accrued and then it turns to sick leave which goes back to your retirement.
Holidays: Christmas to New Years off, Thanksgiving and the day after, MLK, Labor, Memorial, and 4th of July IF it’s on a weekday. If the 4th falls on Sat or Sun, no time off.
I call or text my boss as I see fit. Mostly text these days.
Not really, except rarely he gives me a weird-ass guilt trip for getting sick all of two days in a year while he’s out at the doctor’s every month?
There’s no formal procedure for this. Like everything at my office. I don’t even have sick days, or vacation days really, they just randomly decide if they feel like “giving” me a paid day off based on their emotions. Which is shit, I tell ya. I want them to write up formal procedures but they never will.
And I have a little ball of hatred for people who go to work sick. Coworker comes in sick the week before my one single vacation for the year (all of three days) because he’s a workaholic. Guess what happens? He gets me sick on my vacation. I get to spend my 5 days at the beach with a fever, headache, achy bones, and runny nose. Oh joy. Remember what I said about the emotional thing up there? Only after THAT year when I raised a stink coming back from vacation about how he got me sick, did I get paid for those days and every future vacation day (thus far).
Stay the &(^&) home if you’re sick. Just a little sniffly and your back aches? Stay the heck home anyway, because I don’t want it. Jobs that let you accrue sick time generally give you so many days that a few days off in a year won’t cause a big impact in your sick day savings, anyway.
I send an email to my boss, her co-worker, and their boss. Need to see a doctor after three days and arm oneself with an excuse in case one is asked for.
I send an email to my boss and copy the rest of my team, then go back to bed.
I don’t know how many days I can take before I need a doctor’s note, but if I’m sick enough that I’m going to miss more than 2 or 3 days, I’m going to go see a doctor, so I’ll have one anyway.
I work in IT (I’m a SysAdmin) for a healthcare organization; we are actively encouraged to stay home if we’re sick.
Correct, salaried people in my organization get no sick leave. We only get vacation and holidays. I can call off if I am sick and they don’t dock me. I suppose I could abuse it, and I can see some companies using it as pressure to keep people from coming in, but so far it’s OK with me.
Call, text or WhatsApp the office manager; notify my team/department leader or whoever’s filling in for the latter. Three or more days, get medical note.
In my case it’s PR government exempt service and our leave terms and policies are stupefying by American worker standards. I accrue 1.5 days sick leave per month and can accumulate them up to like 60 or 90 (can’t remember for sure off the top of my head)
No problem. My situation is not unusual, although probably not very well known outside of academia. Most courses at a college are taught by professors (or assistant or associate professors), who are either tenured or “tenure track” (meaning they are working on getting tenure). Teaching is only half of their jobs. They are also expected to do research, bring in grant money, and supervise graduate students. Naturally, that doesn’t leave them a lot of time to teach.
So many departments also hire a few “lecturers” whose only job is to teach classes. My teaching load is twice that of a professor, so I provide more “bang for the buck” as far as getting our catalog of courses taught every semester. The downside is that I am not eligible for tenure. The upside is that I don’t have to worry about NOT making tenure - I have a job as long as they still need me, and as long as I do a decent job of it.
I do work for a specific department within a specific college within a specific university, although I am also allowed to freelance for other departments, and do consulting work on the side. In fact, I picked this job up to supplement my income during a lull in my consulting practice, and now it has pretty much become my full time gig.
I’m a government lawyer, and as such, no one cares if I live or die.
In all seriousness, I have no day-to-day supervision and no set schedule, so there is no required reporting. The only formality is marking a code on my biweekly time report. If I have meetings or calls, I’ll email around to reschedule, or I’ll dial in from home. I’ll usually email my assistant to ask her to put an absence note on my door. On the other hand, if something mission-critical is due, then I won’t be calling in sick at all.
My colleagues and I travel somewhat frequently and irregularly, so if someone is not in, people will usually just assume they’re on the road. Some of us have ruminated as to how long it would take for anyone to notice if we just stopped coming to work, and the consensus is around three weeks.
I’ve never worked for an employer that allowed time to roll over.
I have 25 days of paid time off a year, but the rule is “use it or lose it”.
However, if we get really sick, we have short term disability (paid out at 50% of your base pay rate), long term disability (don’t know the payout amount), and an AFLAC plan (which just gives you money). I believe that the AFLAC plan is only available in my local office – seems whenever someone in one of the company’s red state offices becomes seriously sick or injured, we’re told that there’s a “humanitarian opportunity” to donate to a Go Fund Me to help them. :dubious:
Do you call in and talk to an actual person or a machine?
I call in and talk to a supervisor. As a courtesy I usually send my immediate supervisor a text too.
Is it a difficult process?
Not for me. In my current position there is no minimum staffing. When I was in patrol (and will be again) there is a minimum level they have to maintain. If shift strength goes below that they have to call someone in for overtime. That is a pain in the ass for the supervisor but not the person calling in sick.
How many days can you be sick before you need a doctors excuse?
We have 12 sick days per year. In reality you will feel the pressure if you come anywhere close to that unless it’s something like a surgery. They can ask for a doctor’s note at any time. If they see a pattern to your sick days they can make you bring in a note every time.
This. I was having dinner with my neighbors from across the hall when one got a text saying someone in a play they were in called in sick. They were pretty nonchalant about one neighbor taking the sick person’s role and her gf switching over to hers. They said it was pretty common on small productions.
As an employer, it kind of irks me when an employee repeatedly is sick on the day before a long weekend. But, I do not have any specific rules in place and do not think adults should require rules about sick days, so I just be irked.
I work as an office/computer type guy and it’s super easy.
[ul]
[li]No note needed unless I am going to go on an extended leave that might require partial disability. [/li][li]I can just email my boss and the people on my immediate project and tell them I won’t be in. [/li][li]If I am in the middle of an important launch I may need to ask someone to cover key meetings/triages/on call etc if I can’t take those from home. [/li][li]My company is really open with us working from home as well if we need to. So like say if your family is sick and you just need to be there to get them things but can still do most of your work you can opt for that.[/li][/ul]
The largest chunk of the workforce here works 4 days on 4 days off. You have a 50/50 shot at having your sick day fall on the first or last day. One supervisor was finding patterns when 3 days were taken, 1st day, day in the middle and last day over a several month period. I was a little ridiculous. Things seem to have calmed down now.