In Germany, you just go to any physician and tell the receptionist, you need a day off. The vast majority don’t ask questions. And if they do, you say you got a stomach bug.
I’m pretty sure that’s not right, they cannot require a doctor’s note unless it’s over a certain number of days off. If it’s just the one day it’s unreasonable to require a note.
As long as there is no consistent pattern of absences they should just accept that you are ill and leave it at that, (although if they’re feeling particularly petty, they can insist on a return to work interview). They are absolutely not supposed to ask for a doctor’s note for a single day off because it’s an enormous waste of everyone’s time, and of course if you are ill, you shouldn’t be moving around trying to get a doctor’s note.
I use urgent care for this, because my GP is impossible to get an appointment with quickly. I wait maybe an hour to get seen and get a note, and medication if necessary.
We have an app to our occupational health care provider and you just basically slide a DM to a doc if you need a note (3 days or more of sick leave iirc).
Unlimited PTO is a curse. All it does is scare you into not* actually using it (especially in my line of work where you have a billable hour requirement and every day you take off is just one less day you have to hit your goal).
I hear you and everyone who has said the same thing. But that’s just not the case with me or anyone at my company. My boss just came back from a month long vacation. I’ve already taken 3 weeks and plan to take plenty more. We’re asked to deliver on our projects and we get stuff done. I’m not afraid of taking advantage of what’s promised to me which is outlined in the contract I signed. Again, your miles may vary.
For us, if we’re on vacation we won’t get staffed on new matters so coming back from vacation, we’re essentially spending 2-3 days either trying to get back into the matters we had to let go to go on vacation or searching for new matters. Or alternatively, we work on vacation to not miss a beat. It’s not ideal haha.
Unfortunately a simple “unlimited PTO” policy is fake pro-employee policy.
Overall, studies show employees actually take less days off under that policy, likely due to the uncertainty and stress over what is “really” the expectation, and how it will affect the employee’s job security.
Employees end up working over vacations more often.
Since there are no fixed days, employers don’t need to pay for unused vacation time periodically or when an employee leaves.
It plays out in a way that actually ends up harming the employee.
Every “unlimited PTO” policy should be combined with a minimum PTO policy. If you’re wondering if a company actually cares about its employees’ mental health, that’s how you know.
We had unlimited PTO at my old job and I thought it was awesome. I’d take day off when sick, whenever I needed a break or I would pad my “annual” time off to extend my break over one extra weekend. This felt pretty standard in both places I worked with this policy. There was no question asked and no direct human interaction to take off. If people didn’t take advantage of that it is kinda on them imo. Not to remove anything from your point about forced PTO mixed-in.
Exactly, we don’t have that problem where I work. Personally, I know I don’t take enough time off, but that’s my own fault. I also lost a lot of PTO over the years when I didn’t take it.
I’ve worked at a few places with “unlimited PTO” and I totally agree.
It sounds great in practice: “as long as your work is getting done, take as much PTO as you want!” In reality, it never works out that way because there’s never a “good” time to take a vacation; if you don’t have vacation days that you have to use, you won’t use them.
This isn’t always the case, but it seems to be the majority of companies where it’s used this way. My current job truly is unlimited PTO with an unwritten “TAKE YOUR GODDAMN TIME OFF” rule.
How much PTO do you and your coworkers actually take? Most of my friends and former coworkers I’ve known with unlimited PTO end up taking less than I do.
For comparison, I am also American and don’t have unlimited PTO, but this year I’ll be taking off a total of 7 weeks, not including sick time or holidays, though two of those weeks are company chosen. My sick time is in a separate bucket and is something like 15-25 days per year.
Yep. I have 2 weeks PTO and one of those 2 weeks has to be used all together so you have a week off. That’s the only way you can use one of those 2 weeks of PTO. 40 anytime hours and 40 hours you have to take all together. It’s fucking stupid.
Bro there’s still so many idiots at my workplace working their life away for a stupid card that says “best performer of the month”. I got no problem with that but the issue that I have is they make life hard for guys like me. I know and they know that they can’t afford a shitty 4 bedroom house so why the fuck slave so hard. I really don’t get it
Assuming America it’s because there is a pervasive mentality that the poor here are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires and that through their hard work, they will be restored to their millionaire status. It’s fucking disgusting that companies take advantage of this naivety and sad to see people falling for it. These people grind themselves to dust for a pittance and the reality of the situation rarely hits them.
The whole reason sick days are a thing is that giving employees paid sick time costs you less when they don’t come in and make other employees sick. If enough people get sick in a given org, that has a way of really impacting everything about a workplace, it really is cheaper if they stay home until they’re not contagious.
The worst part of this situation, to me: that anyone is pressing for sick leave to be tightly audited, or seeking to frame its use as a sort of graft or taking from the employer, or a pretext for preemptively firing employees deemed guilty of being too sick. This kind of talk creates pressure for employees to come to work sick in order to avoid being seen as slackers or thieves, and that in turn (especially in an environment full of flu and covid variants, doubly so on the heels of a fucking pandemic so we should all know better by now) defeats the point of having sick days in the first place.
Or a really bad day. Like unbearable pain, or a massive head ache. It’s better if people take the time off and recover because they work better and make fewer mistakes. Nothing sucks more then to redo work.
I was talking about the fact that pain is not contagious … Of course pain is a valid reason to stay at home!
My reasoning was that the risk of spreading the disease can’t be the only reason for companies to let you not go to work because it only applies to infectious diseases!
I think the majority of people misunderstood my comment
Prepandemic, Fleetcor workers in their 20s and 30s took one or two sick days a year, she says. Now, it’s more like three to five.
So pandemic taught people how viruses spread and how not to spread them and coming to work sick is shameful, not a badge of honor. Still, 4 days a year isn’t enough.
I worked with a guy, Clint, who had been at the company his whole life, worked his way from the factory floor to head of accounting. The thing Clint chose to brag regularly about was that he was 60-something and had never taken a sick day. Instead, he’d roll in obviously sick, sneeze on everyone, everyone he saw that day would get sick, a few of them followed his stellar example and got more people sick. During those times, no actual work got done except Clint lamenting about how everyone was getting sick. “Must be the weather.”
I mean, it helped teach me. It’s not that I didn’t actually understand it before, it’s that I hadn’t internalized it (and how selfish it is to go around getting other people sick). My dad is one of the “I never take a sick day!” people and when you hear that enough as a kid, the “merit” of that sticks in your bones. It took me several years as an adult to really believe that I wasn’t selfish or lazy if I took a sick day.
I am interested, but ultimately it’s irrelevant, because our subjective experiences don’t really hold a candle to the entire “anti mask” movement, the culture you’re describing here, and slightly different but akin to that cultural aspect, the idea of “hustling” to chase fortune.
And that’s just the philosophy of it. There’s also the millions that most certainly just don’t understand shit about germs, mechanisms of how illness spreads, etc.
Didn’t every adult in the developed world not learn this as a child from their parents? Or failing that, at school? Are most people genuinely that stupid?
It boggles my mind that it took a world changing pandemic for people to learn basic hygiene! If people just washed their hands occasionally (start with after you go to the toilet) perhaps COVID would have never happened.
Great article in terms of calling out the sentiment, but their analysis is really dumb.
Just to be clear: the idea that sick days somehow impose a financial burden of the company is a blatant lie of criminal proportions. It is a justification for wage theft — the most common and most costly form of burglary in America. Sick days are part of an employees’ compensation package; therefore, sick days are just another form of money owed to the workers. If a company is spending the money that it legally and contractually owes to a worker
Not only is this not accurate whatsoever, as companies are not required to pay you for unused sick time (thus making it not wage theft - also it isn’t wage theft to complain - but the money isn’t contractually owed at all).
What makes this truly bad though is that employers that do pay out for unused sick time see way fewer incidences of “sick time as general PTO,” and workers actually get their full comp, and should be a standard across all employers. They literally skip over the thing that would be better for workers and employers, in their analysis.
If a worker wants to trade pay for time off, that should be their right. They should also be paid for the time off they don’t take, as it is indeed factored into employee comp on the corporate level.
Sick days are part of an employees’ compensation package
Not only is this not accurate whatsoever, as companies are not required to pay you for unused sick time
If the employment contract states “paid sick days” then your take is entirely wrong.
What makes this truly bad though is that employers that do pay out for unused sick time see way fewer incidences of “sick time as general PTO,” and workers actually get their full comp, and should be a standard across all employers.
Great, so we’re back to incentivizing people to not take the time to get better and creating an even more toxic environment for “pushing through”.
The whole idea of paid sick days is to create a burden free environment so that people can take the time to recover without thinking “I really need this extra bit of cash, I’ll just suck it up”.
Cool pro-tip that sometimes works to get around the WSJ paywall, especially if you use DDG. Search for the title of the WSJ article and put “msn” after.
It will sometimes send you to Bing’s google Amp-like (ugh, I know) MSN news site where there is no paywall.
Really sums it up tbh. No one gets through school without needing a sick day, but they offer children a worthless piece of paper for being obedient enough to risk everyone else’s health.
I had serious respiratory immune issues (technically still do) and I actually got in “trouble” with the principal once for missing too many days. He basically tried to intimidate me to admit I was slacking off and skipping out. I laughed and suggested he call my dad and his tone immediately changed.
This was in Canada too. That principal was a worthless sack of turd. He stood in the middle of the hallways between classes and tried to impose this grumpy, mean, “hard ass” attitude.
btw, some of the federal funding that public schools receive is tied to attendance. so in addition to whatever cultural pressures are in operation in schools, they REALLY want students there every day for financial reasons as well.
I’d say work to your compensation, not the bare minimum. Bare minimum is what you do when you make bare minimum. But- do take all your compensation. Time or money, its yours, you earned it.
The issue with the do the bare minimum attitude is it’ll end up hurting you more than them.
Do good work, be reliable, and take the time you’ve accrued/are given. This type of person is above average these days. Only incompetent managers have an issue with that.
I busted ass at my first two jobs and never got raises to match so I walked into my current one with a different mindset. I do only what’s asked of me and nothing more unless I think it’ll fun. When it’s not, I tell them to talk to my boss to get it on my calendar. It’s so much easier to avoid mistakes when you’re not stressed out from overwork.
It’s incredible. I wish I would have thought to do this 15 years ago.
What kind of company doesn’t insure against sickness of their employees? When I mentioned I was sick a lot, my boss at the time laughed and told me the company gets an insurance payment if I’m out, so not to worry. Fyi, I’m in Europe.
Employees are not incentivised to take sick days. Taking a sick day means losing out on pay. They don’t want to do it, they feel the need to do it so that they can recover from genuine illness and perform at their best.
If employees are getting sick at too high of a rate, then employers need to look at the workplace environment they’re providing.
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