I’m curious to find out what is considered “excessive” absenteeism in everyone’s company. I work at a large University hospital and nothing is really written in stone regarding this. Management says it’s handled on a case by case basis and that they look for patterns, etc.
We have some employees that call in sick every other week, and others (like myself) that call in once per year.
At the last place I worked full-time, there was a complicated point system. Basically, hourly employees could have 7.5 unexcused absences in 12 months. Eight absences would get you fired, no exceptions.
Two tardies equalled 1 absence, so you could be fired if you were tardy 16 times. A tardy happens if you punch in after your start time, even if it was just a few seconds. You’re supposed to be at your work station when your shift starts.
There were no guidelines for salaried employees. You had to use vacation or sick leave for unexcused absences. Salaried employees who missed too much work and ran out of vacation or sick days were “counseled”. There was such a climate of fear at that company, people didn’t miss work.
Having more than 2 absences* (or tardies, I guess) in a 90 day period is grounds for disciplinary action, per the Associate Handbook (probably a verbal warning, then a written, then termination). In reality, it’s whatever a given manager chooses to enforce.
*Missing two consecutive days is one absence. Missing 3 consecutive days is still one absence, but requires a doctor’s note.
Oh, and hourlies only get 4 sick days in a year, so they’re burning vacation days after that. I think salaried people get more, but I don’t know how much more. I just know I never seem to run out, not that I take them very often.
Copied from my company’s intranet:
As far as I can tell, “excessive” absenteeism is “calling in sick at all within the last year and not making quota this month.” Acceptable absentism is showing up, mostly sober, for four hours on the last day of the fiscal month, and making quota.
Then again, it is a very casual company. Our dress code boils down to “Not naked, unless you greatly exceed quota.”
hmmm, I dunno what it is at my company. We only have 7 or so employees (those who actually make money, or ensure money is being made, for the company) in the entire organization. All the non-money-making employees I am responsible for - mostly - and they call in sick (or complain of not feelling well) often. All the others, whom I am not responsible for, attend work regularly.
What I wonder is, how many sick days do I have?! This is my first real job, I work 9-5 Tuesday to Saturday and don’t ever call in sick. Mostly because I can’t. However, say I did… would they pay me?
Why does your elite group of seven (or so) money makers even tolerate the existence of lesser people? I’d just fire them mate, and possibly eat their children. I’m sure your “organization” would prosper. :rolleyes:
We have zero “sick days” for hourly workers. We do get four ‘personal’ days per year, but they are to be arranged in advance, calling in sick and asking for a personal day is officially against policy and unofficially at a manager’s discretion.
Each sick day is an occurrence, 3 is a write-up, 4 is a day off, 5 is a week off, 6 is a month and 7 occurrences in a year gets you fired. 3 consecutive days off means you have to open a medical leave and get released by your own doc and the company doc to return to work, medical leaves are counted as one occurrence regardless of their length.
Being tardy can get you one of two ways, excessive tardies are 5 in one year, although 3 tardies equal one attendance occurrence also. You can only be 45 minutes late, after that it’s an absence whether you show up or not.
There are no percent-absent days, although you can arrange a half-personal day in advance at the supervisor’s discretion.
Additionally, there’s a specific call-in phone line, failing to call in to that dedicated answering system before (or 30 minutes after) your scheduled start time is against the rules too. Twice is a write-up and the third is time off.
I could never understand employers punishing absenteeism by giving people days off. Seems counter-intuitive. Like suspending a kid from school for missing school. 
At the last place I worked, if you had to miss work for a court date, you had to use attendance points. A couple of times, the employees would instead break a rule – one punishable by suspension. Suspensions don’t count against attendance points, so you could get a day off.
But the manager decided which day the employee would be suspended. If they were sufficiently pissed off by the game-playing, they would find out what the court date was and schedule the suspension for a different date.
All the game playing gets tiresome, for both sides. I could never understand why, when the employer knew that the employee has to be in court, they just didn’t give them the time off. It’s not like people will commit crimes in order to go to court so they can get time off work.
This was in a factory, where absenteeism meant downtime, maybe lost production, and definitely extra work for everyone. It’s a problem they haven’t been able to solve. They wouldn’t consider hiring extra manpower to cover, except in the summer, when people scheduled vacations. Then they’d hire temporary help, usually college kids.
It’s been all over the map in the 16+ years I’ve been at my current job, from slightly tight to incredibly liberal. When I started more than one or two days in a six month period could trigger a mild comment in your semi-annual evaluation. A day or two more or any sort of consistent pattern could get you put on a “sick leave monitoring” list, where you had to have written justification for anything and were subject to potential disciplinary proceedings.
Then things sort of flip-flopped ( for a variety of reasons ) and we had a written rule ( contract language ) that management couldn’t require a doctor’s notice until you were out ten consecutive days. And the way it was worded that meant you could be out nine, come in one and go then go out again without a problem. I know one guy who was planning on quitting ( he didn’t as it turned out ) who burned 17 days one year without a peep from anybody. A couple of other guys chronically burned all sick days virtually as they accrued them. Initial attempts by upper managment to counter this with a harsh crackdown temporarily foundered a bit when accounting revealed that lower management were actually the worst offenders :p.
This semi-anarchic and really faintly ridiculous state of affairs reverted to a more reasonable compromise a couple of years ago. Now anything up to three days in a six month period is considered acceptable. More than that can trigger sick leave “counseling/monitoring”. Of course all reasonable excuses with doctor’s notice are accepted without question - no one gets fired for legitimate use of sick leave, no matter how much they burn. Two days or less in a six month period triggers a “sick leave exchange” where you can voluntarily sell up to two days back to the company for cash or vacation.
We get 10 days a year, which accrues to a maximum 1040 hours. Anything in excess rolls over into retirement service extension credit. Then when you do retire that 1040 hours can also be added to your service time for pension calculation purposes.
I work for a retail company from the South. Maybe you’ve never heard of it. (Maybe you live in a cave or eat berries or roots.)
They’ve rolled out a new policy about tardiness and absences. I will be honest and upfront about the fact that I have NEVER in my LIFE, been good about being on time. Honestly? Never.
I will also work late, come in on days off and take short lunches. Answer any question I’m asked, to the best of my ability.
(All for pay, I’m not a fool)
They started a new thing…tardiness leads to absences. So I have been the queen of being on time. (And I have been pretty great on getting to work on time. Go Brassy!)
The bad part is this. Today, I have an awful cold. I started feeling bad yestersday. I felt bad when I woke up today. I had to drag myself to work, do a half assed job of my job and be allowed to go home.
Because of their new plan, even if you are sick and go to the doc? That’s not an allowed absence.
So I did ‘presenteeism’. I kept telling people who wanted to pat or hug me, “don’t touch me”. Most of them had already told me I looked like hell.
My coworker with a small child? She sprayed lysol over everything.
I’m going for some orange juice and soup.
We have the policy of:
“If you can’t be at your shift, find someone who can cover for you. If you can’t find someone, you get written up. Three write-ups (not sure the time limit on these) and you are fired.”
So basically, management has passed the buck to us. It’s nice if you want a week off however, because coworkers are always happy to pick up a few extra hours.
We get twelve General Illness days per year, which are fully paid sick days. I don’t think you need a doctor’s note until you’re away sick for at least a week (I was sick for four days in December and my boss didn’t mention anything about needing a note - I did call her every day though to update her on how I was doing). If you run out of sick days, then you progress to using personal days and vacation days. If you’re out of those, it would be unpaid time off.
We’re explicitly told that the General Illness days shouldn’t be considered as extra “vacation” or “personal time”. We have separate allotments for vacation (I get 20 days per year) and PTO (1 day per month). Vacation days don’t roll over from year to year and you can only accrue three days of PTO.
General Illness days accrue up to a maximum of 104 (I think). Thus, it’s to your benefit not to use up your sick days if you don’t need to, so if you ever get really sick (like short-term disability) then you can get full pay for the accrued number of days (instead of the lower pay that short-term disability usually gives.)
Note: all of the above is for salaried employees at my company. Some employees are on long-term contract (they get PTO, the choice of vacation pay or taking vacation days, and no General Illness days), and some are short-term contract employees (PTO only).
We get 5 sick days the first year and 8 the following year and 10 a year after that, plus four weeks vacation.
I love Australia.
My last US company was 2 sick days per year, but don’t take them, cause people get mad. 
Cheers,
G
My husband’s company policy says they get six sick days. But if you actually take them, you run the risk of being fired. How’s that for intimidation?
I’d like to hear from other “work at homes”… do you get the stink-eye if you call in sick? Most of the work-at-homes I work with NEVER take a day off for illness. You can drift away from your computer for a couple hours (which I’ve done when the back is acting up and I can’t sit for a solid 8 hours), but everyone is on line for at least part of the day. You have to have an open chest wound to actually not work.
The place I work has a strange attitude to sick days. We’re allowed to take as many as we need but at the end of the year you get pulled over the coals if you’ve taken what are deemed to be “too many”.
I got it mentioned at my first 1:1 meeting with my boss this year because I had a total of 16 working days in the last 12 months. What annoyed me about the whole thing was that 12 of those working days were under a Doctor’s note so I was obviously genuinely ill, had seen a GP, was taking medication and was deemed by that GP to be unfit for work. I had a chest infection and bronchitis so even if I’d struggled into work, I’d have been sitting there coughing all day, feeling like death on a plate and not putting more than about 10% into my job.
So what do these people want? This year I plan to have no sick days at all. That means I’ll go into work on public transport, sit in an open-plan office and spread every single one of my germs around, thereby causing the rest of the office to get ill too. Will that make my employer feel better? I hope so!
We don’t even have a maximum on our number of days of sick leave, although obviously abuse of the system is punished.
Previously I’ve had 6 days off in 17 years, and two of those were when I was sent home.
Recently my parents passed and my boss told me to take off as much time as I needed.
For graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in my lab, the Bossman said something very much like the following:
“I expect 72 hours/week. Split it up how you like. Take a weekend day off, or take every other whole weekend off. Whatever. You get four weeks off…I think. Let me know when you won’t be here [not like he keeps track.]”
As long as you’re getting work done, he doesn’t seem to care much. If he feels like you’re slacking, you’re going to feel the burn. One grad student ended up having to check in with the boss’s assistant every day and probably got a shitty recommendation when he was looking for a place to do his postdoc.
There generally is no arriving “late.” The boss shows up ~8:30. He did tell one grad student that he wanted her in by 9. One guy doesn’t show up until after I’ve eaten lunch, but you’ll often see him at work well past midnight.
When I played in a symphony orchestra a while back, I’m honestly not sure what the official policy was (if there was one.) A bunch of people missed every Wednesday rehearsal because they were playing in another nearby orchestra that rehearsed then. I think it was mostly that if things became a problem, you’d get the boot. A lot of players were in some union, so that may have complicated matters. I wanted no part in that so I’m not sure.