*Cough, cough* “I’m not feeling well,” *cough* “So, I won’t be able to come in today.” Have you ever said that and then experienced a rather miraculous recovery by the time you hung up the phone? This magical cure is called, “Using a sick day as a vacation day,” and according to a new survey by Adecco, 47 percent of workers have used a sick day when they were really taking vacation.
To keep reading click here: Do you get enough vacation time?
I am in a specialty position and find it difficult to get time off. Combine that with my less than senior position and I rarely get the good vacation picks. Note all of my time off, sick and vacation, comes from the same bank. The only difference is “sick” is considered an unscheduled absence. IMHO it takes allot of call-ins to even get into trouble. It would be far easier to make the occasional call-in than play the game and get scheduled vacation time. One of these days I may consider this as a method to a means.
As I continue to do research on Generation Y and their impact on the workplace in the coming years, I hear one of the things they’re changing is the vacation time dynamic. Specifically…UNLIMITED vacation time.
The company I work for also combines sick days and vacation days into one bank. It’s not a big an issue since I work for an insurance company. But previous to my insurance job I worked for a hospital system that did the same thing. Very. Bad. Idea. People came in sick to work all the time to preserve their vacation time, particularly younger workers who had to work longer to make up the missed days than more senior workers. The hospital talked a big game about people not coming into work sick, and if you had the flu, you had to be out a certain number of days. Needless to say, people who called in sick would just cite a ‘cold’ regardless of what they had. I work in Safety, and when myself and the hospital’s infection control coordinator would point out this problem, the powers that be refused to look at changing the sick time set up and instead wanted to stick to appealing to staff to do the right thing. Given the nature of the work, I think the high level folks really should have had a better plan to limit the number of sick workers coming into contact with ill patients.