My company also gives sick days along with vacation days, and they expect us to take the sick days by the end of the year even if we’re not sick. As weird as it sounds, they also encourage us to plan them if possible, like for appointments or mental health days. Is there a way to find out if your company has a similar stance on taking sick days?
Define “sick”. Seriously. If I’m “sick” of working and take a day off, returning rejuvenated. . .
I think it is usually within the bounds of ethics to use them to go to routine doctor/dentist/mental health appointments, or to stay home to care for a sick family member. My job has extremely strict and literal sick leave rules, and both of these are explicitly permitted uses of sick leave.
ETA: I have also worked at places that considered it “personal time” and did not require any justification for your absence. You could basically take a vacation under “personal time” as long as it wasn’t 3 or more consecutive days. However, that is not the case at my present place of work. Any leave taken under “sick leave” must be documented (ie, a note that you were seen) and medical in nature.
x10,000,000.
Companies that differentiate between sick days and vacation days are full of shit. At my previous work places, there was simply paid time off, and you were free to use it due to illness, trip to the Bahamas, or the desire stay at home and watch paint dry. Companies that allot for sick time and personal time separately are trying to weasel you out of time off.
I was once warned that I had taken all of my sick days and that any others I took would go unpaid. That’s fine, but where is my additional pay for all of the nights and weekends that I worked, the exhaustion of which probably made me sick in the first place? They didn’t have an answer for that.
I’ve worked at some places where yuo could take off so many sick days (like four), but you had to have a doctor’s note for each one. Seriously? The commonly accepted cure for a cold is to stay in bed, not interrupt a busy doctor’s day just so you can be told that you should have stayed in bed.
At all places I’ve worked, vacation time is basically part of your annual salary and if you leave the company with time accrued (most places I’ve been don’t give it all to you at once, but you earn a little bit w/ each pay cycle) and when you leave the company you recieve the balance of your time cashed out.
Sick time, or optional, or personal days - are counted differently and are not cashed out when you leave.
So if you take a sick day when you’re not sick, instead of a vacation day, you kind of are stealing from the company since you’re not tapping into that vacation reserve. If I have 5 vaca days that would cash out at $1000, but then I take a sick day when I’m not sick, I still have that $1000 sitting there if I decide to quit (instead of $800 if I’d taken the day in the ethical day.
With all that said, though, I often take sick days when I’m not sick and just need a day off. As long as someone doesn’t abuse the system by constantly calling out I consider it pretty low on the Unethical Meter.
Eh. I kind of like having separate sick days and vacation days, as long as they can roll over to the next year.
If sick days and vacation all come out of one pot, then you inevitably end with coworkers who are jerkwads who come in when they’re sick and make everyone else sick, because they’ve pre-planned to use all their days off for their vacation later in the year, and they didn’t leave any days as a buffer in case they get sick or have an emergency, and heaven forbid they take an unpaid day off when they’re very sick and contagious.
I think that depends on the sort of job you have. Annual leave is something which is generally planned, so the employer knows that you’ll be off for x number of days and can plan replacement staff accordingly. Sick leave is often phoned in on the actual day, which can make for headaches at the sharp end of the workload.
If I or one of my colleagues ring in sick, we have to be replaced or block beds. Telling patients that we’re short staffed, so they’ll just have to wait until the following day for their medications and treatment just isn’t on. Lumping in sick leave with annual leave and having staff just randomly deciding to take a day off because they wanted to go to the beach would be a nightmare at my workplace.
If you don’t take a mental health day here and there every once and a while, you’ll burn yourself out. And I wouldn’t want you working for me 
Agree. Personally, other than when I was hospitalized with a gallbladder that needed removed, I’ve never taken a sick day when I was sick. Cold/flu/headache/hangover/whatever I go to work. That way I can go kayaking/hiking/etc with my “sick” days.
Sure. And part of the agreement is: “You have X days off, per year, with pay, for “sick days”.” Companies budget for paying “sick days” as part of their regular employee compensation package. If they thought they could get good employees without that part of the compensation package, they’d drop it. But if the company promises its employees sick days as part of their benefits, then it’s not stealing if the employees take it. The details of what an employee needs in the way of healthcare is actually none of the company’s business. If they try to come back and insist that the employee present a note or something, then the company is the one trying to weasel out of its agreements.
It does…but I have trouble doing that for a company that would never do the same for me, or rather, if they wanted to get rid of me, would find any legal way to do it. I don’t take sick days willy-nilly because my coworkers need me, and I enjoy my job, but that doesn’t mean I am a slave to it. The company has no particular loyalty to me. I will honor my agreements as much as I can when it comes to them.
I have no problems using a sick day for an occasional mental health day, but I wouldn’t expect people to use all their sick days just because they could. I’m expected to work extra hours, nights and weekends and that’s accepted as part of the job. I’m compensated for that.
My current company doesn’t have allotted sick days but previous companies have. I don’t think it’s a great idea but if that’s what the company has chosen I wouldn’t expect to use them as personal days. We had a few of those and I would use them for whatever I wanted. I’d only use a sick day as a personal day if I was really burnt out or had done a great deal of extra work. In most of those cases my boss has just told me to take a day so I didn’t need to use sick days.
Yep. Our sick days roll over too. I have something like 800 hours accrued. If I get a nasty flu or need surgery or something, I don’t have to worry about burning vacation time for it.
We almost went to personal days, and it was universally and SOUNDLY defeted. Mostly because the first thing that would happen is all of our accumulated sick leave would get dumped.
And to the OP. I don’t feel that I need to be really sick to use a day here or there. If I’m getting my job done and not missing deadlines, I take a sick day if I’m feeling a little off, didn’t get good sleep or generaly don’t think I can be very productive.
A few years ago, my organization switched from the old standard of vacation/personal/sick days to PTO. I’m surprised more companies haven’t done so, as the old system is burdensome for both the employer and employee.
What used to happen in my organization under the old system, is staff would use up their vacation and personal days and have nothing left by November but sick days, so guess what happened? Half the staff called in sick in November and December, using up their remaining sick time, and putting undue stress on managers who had to deal with increased, unscheduled absenteeism during this period.
We realized that there was no point in segmenting time off into buckets, and consolidated all time off so each employee gets a bank of hours they can use any way they want. What do we care if they’re taking the time for a personal reason, a vacation, or if they’re under the weather?
Once we switched to the new system, we were immediately rewarded by far fewer employees calling in sick, and a precipitous drop-off in absenteeism in November and December.
Is it just me, or does sick leave (and all other types of leave) smack of not being actually treated as a salaried employee? If you are salaried, you are being paid to get something done, not to be there a certain number of hours, right? So if you can get all your work for the week done by Thursday afternoon, if you were really salaried, you could take Friday off, right?
Wrong. Are you not in the US?
Depends on your job and the type of work. Most executive types are expected to be there if the office is open to be available to oversee issues. If your work is the sort where you have assignments/ contracts, then that is certainly an option. It is worth nothing though that the majority of salaried employees, (at least at the lower end of the pay scale) usually get ass raped by the company when you compare it hourly. However, I can understand the appeal of knowing exactly how much you get compensated, and being able to depend on it every week. certainly makes budgeting easier.
Sick leave is a conditional benefit. It means that if you are not sick you do not qualify for the benefit.
It’s like having handicapped parking for employees. It’s a benefit for company employees but it applies only to disabled people.
I worked at one company where sick leave was defined as strictly sudden, non-planned illnesses. For instance, if I needed a gall bladder operation, I would not be allowed to use sick leave. Why? Because unless it was emergency surgery, I could plan for the surgery and should use my other time off.
If I went to the dentist for a check up, it’s not sick leave. I should’ve scheduled the appointment for my day off.
I don’t agree with this logic, but why is it done like this. Because it’s cheaper for the company and looks good on the books.
What people often fail to realize is, is that vacation time is NOT a conditional benefit. It is earned. It must be paid for upon separation. (With a few exceptions if you handle the accounting right)
By making sick leave a conditional benefit, it doesn’t show up as earned on the company books. In other words vacation time is earned so it’s a liability and that is BAD for the company books.
Now this is a general rule, there are “ways” of using accounting to get around the rules, and it works for both employees and employers.
For example courts have ruled in Illinois, that if an employer accrues for sick time, it must be paid, even though it’s not earned. In other states that ruling of the court doesn’t apply.
I’ve always got my sick pay upon separation, simply by threatening to make a big deal of it. I simply say “I want my sick pay.” They say, “No.” I say, “Fine, I’m not gonna argue about this, this is why we have lawyers. You get a lawyer, I’ll get a lawyer we’ll let them fight it out. Of course I’ll win and you’ll wind up paying my court costs and getting in trouble with the labor dept.”
Often times this threat is not accurate at all, but it has worked 100% of the time, as it’s easier to pay someone off then fight them.
I know for some companies sick/vacation time is a huge issue. I recall when I first started working for Starwood Hotels back in the 90s. They had bought Westin and ITT Sheraton and they had three kept the benefits and rules for each company. So we had one set of rules for ex-Westin, one set for ex-Sheraton and one set for new Starwood.
They asked me to help them start combining the rules into one set. I found vacation/sick days to be costly. Some people had NEVER taken any time off and were holding it.
I found directors having accumulated four months paid time off. I found housekeepers with 1000 hours of paid time off due to them. These people had worked for decades and just took days off without pay.
It was a mess to clean that up and get everyone on the same page.
Jerks will be jerks no matter how time off is divvied up, I say, but I could be wrong. It’s happened.
Fair enough, but nobody died if I didn’t feel like coming in for my job at the bank or the insurance/securities brokerage firm, or whatever else office gigs I fall into.
How many times have you done this?