How social media is helping employers clamp down on ‘sickies’

By Neil Patrick

Absenteeism costs organisations a great deal. In Australia, it is estimated to be $3,000 per employee, equivalent to $28 billion a year.

And it occurs for all sorts of reasons. Some are almost legitimate, such as family emergencies. Others less so like hangovers.

I’m not going to condone it, but I think like a lot of HR issues, it needs to be tackled with smarter solutions rather than simply more bureaucratic and punitive ones.

The reasons people falsify sickness to take paid leave are of course numerous. But we shouldn't stereotype all young people as lazy, drunken wasters, just as we shouldn’t assume all older people are automatically weak and unhealthy.

If you’d like to see statistics about who is most and least absent from work, data from these Canadian Government statistics in 2011 showed that women aged 55-64 had the highest incidence of absenteeism at 11.2% and men aged 20-24 had the lowest at 6.4%.

And employers have a part to play too; they shouldn't just treat it as a 'crime' which has to be detected and punished. They should look hard at how the organisation accommodates the fact that their staff are people not machines. However inconvenient it may be when you are trying to run a business, the reality is that people have complicated lives which are full of unexpected and unplanned twists and turns.

The problem in my opinion isn’t lazy people usually (although there will always be some). It’s much more diverse and multi-faceted. Basically, life has a way of never quite going to plan.

Sometimes a domestic or family emergency happens, which is certainly not grounds for calling in sick. But it may be difficult to try and negotiate a day’s unplanned leave and easier just to feign sickness. It may not be us that is involved, but rather someone who depends on us and really needs us to do something for them right now. It’s hard to say no to a friend in need and many people just opt for the simplest and least negotiable choice which is to call in sick.

If employers treated absenteeism as something they can accommodate with better policies and more flexible systems, I think they’d have fewer sickies and a happier workforce.

It just takes a little imagination and some creative thinking. Like what you ask?

If you watch this short news report, you’ll see how one boss adopted a creative solution to keeping tabs on an employee who’d been caught taking a 'sickie’.

He ‘friended’ him on Facebook!

Smart move.