Instructions:
Analytical Essay:
This assessment task consists of a 1300 word essay and requires students to critically analyse a current HRM issue and its implications on the sustainability of the organisation.
Read the following case study which will enable you yo answer the question that follows
CASE STUDY 10
Sick leave costing employers Sick leave is leave that employees can take when they can’t attend work because they are sick or injured; however, the Australian ‘sickie’ originally in work agreements to protect sick workers from pay reduction has turned into a national pastime without any consequences for the impact that this theft has on business. Stealing time that you are not entitled to — the sickie — is so entrenched in the work culture in Australia that it is seen as an entitlement. Employers struggle with the fine line of trust and betrayal. Should employees need to produce a doctor’s certificate for a missed day? This puts considerable pressure on the health system for what could be a genuine sickness — say, a migraine that only needs sleep and medication. Is this a deterrent for workers if they have to spend half their day going to the doctor?
According to a 2016 survey by Clipp, Australia Day is the most popular day of the year to take a sickie.1 In fact, Australia Day in 2016 was projected to cost employers $62 million, as workers gave themselves an unofficial long weekend ahead of the Tuesday public holiday. It was estimated that more than 180 000 people nationwide were expected to dial in a sickie.2 A lack of flexibility in an organisation can cause an increase in the sick leave rate. An employee requesting two hours to go to the dentist reflects a need, and the time can be made up if permitted by managers. However, refusing this request could result in a full day off and the lost productivity that entails. A 2015 Direct Health Solutions survey of 97 organisations, that employ 220 000 employees across Australia, found that Monday was the most popular days for employees to call in sick, with a whopping 40 per cent of sick days falling on a Monday.3 The same survey estimated that ‘sickies’ are costing Australian businesses $32.5 billion a year — which equates to an average of $347 per day per employee. Paul Dundon from Direct Health Solutions says that 6.5 days of sick leave absenteeism each year is an acceptable level; however, Australians are currently clocking up an average of 8.6 days per year.
A 2015 Direct Health Solutions survey of 97 organisations, that employ 220 000 employees across Australia, found that Monday was the most popular days for employees to call in sick, with a whopping 40 per cent of sick days falling on a Monday.3 The same survey estimated that ‘sickies’ are costing Australian businesses $32.5 billion a year — which equates to an average of $347 per day per employee. Paul Dundon from Direct Health Solutions says that 6.5 days of sick leave absenteeism each year is an acceptable level; however, Australians are currently clocking up an average of 8.6 days per year.
One mid-career consultant from a big-name firm said she took ‘sickies’ that were really ‘stress leave’, but had never been quizzed over them. ‘I don’t think you’re allowed . . . but I take them’, she says. ‘I think it makes up for the fact that people do heaps of overtime. It’s overlooked if they are a bit flexible with their interpretation of sick leave.’ She said sickies in the corporate world were not a big issue, and that the most she had seen taken was when she was working as a retail assistant. ‘People just don’t show up. They don’t even get paid for it. Maybe it’s correlated to how dreadful your job is.’
Dundon says that an average of one in every forty workers is off sick on any given day. Conversely, in some organisations, it can be common for staff to take no, or very few, sick days. Often this is because employees feel that their work is so urgent that they can’t contemplate having a day off — even when they are genuinely sick. Dundon’s company offered absentee management, whereby staff are required to phone a call centre and talk to a nurse rather than phoning in to their immediate manager. It is claimed that this has halved the levels of absenteeism for some of his clients, as ‘People taking a sickie are more reluctant to fake it to a kindly nurse on the other end of the phone line’.
The national president of the Australian Human Resources Institute, Peter Wilson, says that a high level of absenteeism can indicate that something is not quite right in an organisation — such as ‘industrial unrest, job insecurity and redundancies, and bad job design’. Mary Wyatt, an occupational physician and manager of Return to Work Matters, says sickness absence comes down to management by individual organisations. She says workers’ perceptions of how they are treated by management can be an indicator of the likelihood of large amounts of sick leave — as is having a large number of workers doing the same thing (such as working on a factory line or in a call centre).4
However, sickies are not only an Australian phenomenon; unauthorised absenteeism occurs internationally. Asia and Africa have the lowest rates of absenteeism, whereas the United States and Western European countries such as Germany and France have the highest rates, with Australia and New Zealand falling in the middle.5
Caring for (sick) family members and worker job dissatisfaction are cited by most workers as the main causes of absenteeism. Some reasons for taking a sickie are far less obvious; for example, an Air New Zealand employee was sacked because she took a sick day to see a Robbie Williams concert. She would not have been caught had she not flown from Auckland to Wellington using her staff discount on the airfare.6 In some countries, legislation supports an employer’s right to request a medical certificate for the purpose of establishing the genuineness of an application for paid sick leave — even for a single sick day.7 However, organisational psychologist Dr Peter Cotton asserts that everyone, at some stage, wakes up in the morning and just doesn’t feel like going to work, for a variety of reasons. Cotton’s belief is that employers should sanction ‘doona days’ twice a year so that, for those rare mornings, employees can just put the doona back over their head and not go into work. The belief is that this will help to reduce stress, particularly in an era where up to 20 per cent of workers in Australia and New Zealand work more than 50 hours per week.8
QUESTIONS
1. Do you take sickies? Why or why not? Would your perspective change as a manager, as opposed to being an employee?
2. Many organisations have very generous leave plans for their employees. Do you think that this approach will ultimately reduce the abuse of sick leave?
3. How do you counter your employee’s statement, ‘It’s part of the Australian culture’?
4. What approaches could managers take to reduce a high sick leave cost to the bottom line?