Monday was billed as National Sickie Day, with around 350,000 people expected to call in sick and cost around £45 million in wages and lost hours. Coined by ELAS in 2011, the law company has compiled a list of the top excuses from the past year.
Ranging from the unlikely to the bizarre, ELAS claims all the excuses were genuinely given by their clients over the course of the last year:
- I have no way to get to work
- My wife earns more than me so I have to look after the kids
- The dog ate my shoes
- I stayed out too late partying last night and haven’t had any sleep
- My only pair of work trousers is in the wash
- I’m too drunk to drive
- I lost my PPE
- I got arrested
- My friend is on annual leave so I can’t get a lift
- It’s my dog’s birthday and I need to arrange a party for him
“As an employer you are perfectly entitled to challenge the authenticity of an absence,” said Emma O’Leary, employment law consultant for ELAS. “If you notice a pattern emerging then you should speak to the employee about their poor attendance and take proactive steps to action it. ”
“It is useful to have a formal system in place to monitor absences, such as triggers on a points-based system like the Bradford Factor or ELAS’s Absence Assist which helps identify trends and has been proven to reduce absence rates by up to 62 percent,” she continued. “The key is not to penalise genuine absences but to tackle the trend of sickies.”
