So how many of ya'll use sick days (assuming you get sick leave separate from regular annual leave) when you're just sick of work? The old mental health day? Or do you consider it dishonest/theft/whatever to use sick leave if you're not actually sick?
Had this discussion recently. Just curious to see some of the thoughts of this group.
I use about half my sick days when I'm actually sick and the other half as mental health days. My rationale is that, if I worked until 11 one day to get something done, and the next day I'd just zone out - better to recuperate fully and give my all the day after. It's healthier for me and works out better for my company (they get one day at 100% rather than 2 days at 50% or 40%).
Agred with m741. Add to that :
30m dental appointment ? Full sick day
45m physical ? Full sick day
My son has an appointment for anything involving a doctor ? Full sick day.
Is my DW sick? Full sick day.
Having said that - I'm still maxed on sick days ( or hours in my firms case ).
When i worked (nudge nudge) if i felt i needed a sick day i would take one...even if it was to do nothing much. Having said that I do not think premeditated ticking off of ones full sickday entitlements is kosher. If you need a day off take it - otherwise do your duty and rock up to work.
I only take sick days when I'm very sick and luckily that's not very often. If I'm just kind of sick, I stick it out at work or work from home.
I think I'm in the minority though, I know people that make it a point to not let their bank of sick time get too high.
I get all my days as one category "Paid Time Off" & my company actually encourages us to use all of them every year. No reason not to, as nothing gets carried over. I get 27 right now.
If I did get sick days I wouldn't hesitate to use them. I disagree with Aussie on this, which isn't normal. It's dispicable how little time off is given. Use all of it, no matter what dumbass category some HR dweeb puts it in.
I wish everyone else would to. Ahem....dot_com_vet....please stay home when sick :)
I only use my sick days when I am sick but the nice thing is that, in addition to my vacation days, I also get 5 unpaid personal days a year. I make sure to use these every year so I get an extra week of vacation a year. :)
I consistently take a mental health day about every 3-4 weeks. It got to a point where I felt it was so predictable I had to go out of my way to make sure they at least didn't land on Mondays or Fridays every time. I'm not having it very easy at work right now though. Also, in my considerations, are that, with us being feds, all of the sick leave we accumulate will be worth exactly ZERO once we quit, whereas the annual leave will get paid out as a lump sum. Also, I wouldn't do it unless I already had substantial hours banked (I have 300 banked, roughly.)
It is really nice short term disability insurance though. The ideal is to save up 2080 hours. I knew a lady who got cancer and she took an entire year of sick leave. She came back to her job and she was essentially fine by the end of that year. Good stuff.
The thing about sick leave, as a fed, is that if you request it and it is for an approved purpose (medical exam, etc), your manager MUST grant it, they do not have the authority to not grant it. However, if abuse is suspected, they can start requiring a doctor's note every damn time. So that keeps me (relatively) on the straight and narrow.
One thing that I have been caught by though a couple times, is having a mental health day, and then within 2-4 days, actually get moderately sick (mild cold, hangover, etc) and then I have to pick myself up and go to work so as not to look too suspicious. That kind of sucks when that happens.
self-employed
agree absolutely it depends on the work situation and also how many annual leave days you have.
In Australia we have 4 weeks paid annual leave. I understand this is not standard (much less) in the US.
As many as needed/I feel like.
Company has a fairly lax attitude towards monitoring vacation, sick days etc. And yet, many people do not take their full earned vacation even when the company policy is use it/lose it..i.e. no carryover of vacation into next year.
I guess some folks just don't know what to do with their free time. Companies love such people.
@LS: Unsurprisingly, we're on the same page. If sick leave were compensated when I left then I'd probably let it accrue without caring, but since it isn't and annual leave is... I'd feel like an idiot storing up a ton of sick leave. The way I see it, if something happens where I need to be out of office longer than 100 hours or so, and can't even work from home or anything, it must be a pretty catastrophic illness/injury and I may even have other sources of income for the absence (ala PIP insurance, etc). Either way, my job would still be secure via FMLA leave.
It's also a factor in my personal consideration that if I didn't take mental health days using sick leave, I would barely ever use sick leave at all except for dentist's appointments. I am healthy and don't really get sick. When I do it's more of a passing head cold that doesn't really slow me down. (Knock on wood) In three years of full-time employment, I may have been sick enough not to go to work maybe once or twice--if so I don't recall them.
I must admit, though, I did have a time earlier this year like you said--where I took a day off early in the week and then ended up with the worst migraine headache I've had in years a few days later and had to stick it out in the office. That was bad... but a rare occurrence in all respects.
Overall, though, I agree with Chad: if it's part of your compensation package you should be entitled to use it as you see fit regardless of what HR wants to call it.
Many companies have realized that non accruing sick leave is a negative-placebo (nocebo). The use-it-or-lose-it aspect actually causes people to become sick so they don't lose it.
A system of Personal Days like Chads "paid time off" has the opposite effect. Nobody wants to waste a paid day off being sick so they engage those mysterious "powers" that account for the placebo-effect and actually make themselves well. Think of it as a slightly different kind of sugar pill that they believe will cure them.
As an aside . . .
One day I was looking for someone at work to turn in some paperwork. I was told she was sick. The next day when I went to see her she confessed that she had a bad case of "anal glaucoma". She explained that when she woke up the previous morning she just could not see her ass going into work that day.
I guess that's a mental health day.
@Ego -
In the federal government it's called the FERS Flu - (Federal Employees Retirement System) - hehe
@SW -
Feel the same way, if I was going to stick around for 25+ years or even if there was some benefit upon leaving, I'd accrue it, but as it is, I already feel stupid as it is, leaving 300 hours on the table. In my last 30 days of employment I am sure the "stress" of "looming unemployment" will be so severe as to possibly suck up another 100 hours or more. I will likely need medical certs for that though. I don't get sick much either, so any time I have an excuse to use sick leave I most definitely do. One nice perk though is if you ever get another federal job, you can get your sick leave reinstated. That's a big "if" though - way more vets coming out of the woodwork now with people coming home from Iraq & Afghanistan.
A friend works for Kaiser-Permanente. He notes that when they wanted to cut down on "sick leave abuse", the company carefully explained what FMLA was and how to use it to the employees and that sick leave useage would be examined.
The end result, naturally, is that employees carefully filed the FMLA papers, thereby moving more of the usage into a protected category. And sick leave useage has not dropped.
So an update from me - last week I received a letter proposing my removal from my job. So now it could happen as early as July 5. So I got the letter from the doctor and... I feel horribly guilty! How much leave would you take? How often? Especially considering it is worthless once we part ways.
If it were me, and I had no plans of ever coming back or asking for a reference... I'd burn up every last hour I had if I could. Especially in a situation like yours.
What are they going to do... propose your removal? ;)
I hadn't taken an hour of sick leave in twenty years until I got a case of swine flu in '07 and had to take 4 days off. After that, I needed access to the salary & leave accrual data in my employer's data base. I then learned of the many folks that take 120 hours of paid sick leave year after year. That's three full weeks! On top of their 3 weeks of vacation leave. And there was absolutely no repercussions for these people. And many of these people were well-regarded by sr. management and others were mid level managers. After that I started taking a few hours here and there to take care of personal business, but only up to 40 hours in a year.
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