Fair enough, I agree he was being passive aggressive, but on the other hand, if someone is doing something that has the appearance of impropriety, it's a good idea to proactively bring it up with the boss to head off the suspicions.
Have you ever been managed by a passive-aggressive person? I haven't personally, but I know many people who have been, and the stain they leave on a team lasts years.
Your implication here is that it the the subordinate's job to read the mind of management. She must know what is 'proper' in her manager's mind outside of the explicit rules of the job. Management, however, is allowed to read her state of mind incorrectly and adjust her pay accordingly.
Obviously power imbalances like this exist everywhere, and it's wise to be proactive and careful, but that doesn't mean we should hold up examples like these as just or reasonable outcomes.
What does "improper" mean and who gets to decide what actions are improper? Paid days are paid days and just because they have a certain name doesn't change a thing. Has anyone ever been accused of faking a vacation? Of course not, because that would be ridiculous. But since sick days are called sick days all of a sudden you need to prove you're bedridden or else face consequences? That's absurd. Treat your employees like adults.
Sick days and vacation days typically have different notification requirements- in most places that had them I've worked at, it was 2 weeks for vacation and asap for sick leave. Vacation time could be denied if, say, the job involved time sensitive equipment or safety related tasks (I.e. nursing) and others had already requested the time off.
Abusing sick leave- depending on the job- has very real consequences for your coworkers and company, if someone absolutely has to pick up your slack.
Confirmed. I'm a manager right now, and I get emailed to approve vacation days but I only have on-demand visibility into my team members' personal and sick days. Those last two types are auto-approved if the employee hasn't run out of them, since nobody gets to choose when they're necessary.
All three of these paid leave types are limited in number of days per year at my current employer, despite my preference as per another comment for paid sick days to be unlimited. I don't make those rules here.
However there are labour laws in force which protect the right to total (mostly unpaid) sick leave for 26 weeks out of every 12 months, including rights to return to the company afterward. (Special cases allow different totals, sometimes even two years for things like a minor child dying. And yes there are government-paid sickness benefits here in most long-lasting sick leaves.)
I agree that those kinds of statutory long durations are pretty different from the kind of sick leave I think should be unlimited, but having to care about 5 vs 10 vs 15 days total per year is not conducive to a healthy workplace, absent reason to suspect fraud.
Why is it abuse if I use my PTO? The whole point of PTO is that the company is agreeing to give you 10 days worth of slack. So obviously it shouldn't be a problem if you use that 10 days of slack. Are you telling me that the company is lying about the benefits it provides, and that it doesn't actually provide 10 days of sick leave? What else are they lying about?
> Are you telling me that the company is lying about the benefits it provides,
No, I'm telling you that there's a difference in requirements for taking sick leave versus vacation. The only reason that sick leave doesn't have the same requirement as vacation is you don't choose when you get sick. If you take a sick day as a vacation day, you're forcing others to scramble to make up for you not being there.
> Why is it abuse if I use my PTO?
Perhaps you missed my intended emphasis on certain jobs that have time or safety sensitive responsibilities, such as nursing. It may not hurt the company for you to take those 10 days, but it does hurt whoever gets called in to fill in for you when they otherwise would have had off.
Here's a simple, real-world example: A company that runs a group-care home for disabled adults is currently understaffed due to a number of circumstances (the difficulty of the job being the biggest). There are four employees to cover 21 8-hour shifts each week (24 hours a day, 7 days a week total).
If someone calls in sick, the one of the others has to cover the shift. Under no circumstances can the house ever be unstaffed. Aside from a bit of overtime pay, the company isn't hurt, but everyone else is.
Not all jobs are like this. The consequences of taking a sick day as a vacation day (or simply being sick) usually aren't that severe. Maybe it's a manufacturing line and the manager has to step in to fill your role or something. Maybe it has no effect at all on anyone around you. In those cases, maybe it doesn't make sense for the company to distinguish between time off for being sick, and time off for vacation.
> The whole point of PTO is that the company is agreeing to give you 10 days worth of slack.
No, that's only true if the company doesn't distinguish between sick time off and vacation time off. Typically, where I've worked, all PTO was lumped into a single bucket, and no-one really cared. However, that is really more true of white collar work with long timelines and not so much in most other jobs (or the parent post I was replying to).
Well, I disagree with your assessment that by taking my sick days I am hurting another employee. It's actually you, as the employer, who offered me 10 days of sick leave, and who knowingly understaffed your workplace assuming that I wouldn't use that time off, who is hurting your employees. Don't rationalize it by putting the responsibility on me. You're the one who told me I was allowed to do it. If you don't want to offer 10 days of paid sick leave then don't offer it, but don't punish me for using it, and don't try to guilt me out of using it by pretending that I'm the one creating the situation. It's your job to staff your workplace appropriately.
So do those consequences you mention suddenly disappear if you're _actually_ sick? The fixation on "abuse" and that it can be easily determined doesn't make sense.
No, the consequences don't disappear. But, if you're in a position where when there's a difference in notice required for planned (vacation) and unplanned (sick) time off, and you take sick time off for vacation, you're effectively creating an unnecessary disruption. Maybe the manager has to scramble to find someone willing to come in on short notice. Maybe a temp staffer has to be hired in from an agency. Maybe that's not feasible, and someone has to work a double shift. Depends entirely on the job.
If it doesn't matter, then the company shouldn't be distinguishing between vacation and sick time off anyway. If it does matter, then personally I wouldn't want to work with someone who would do that.
My father once told me that honor is what separates men from animals, and honor is what you do when nobody is looking. We all get to choose who we are.
I was also fortunate to attend a university with an honor system, to the extent that exams weren't even allowed to be proctored. Whether you cheated or not was up to you, nobody would know.
I appreciated that system, and have tried to live it long after graduation. I could go on, but it has proved to be more than worthwhile.
The honor system in the university trusted people to not cheat and they did not proctor exams. That doesn't mean cheating was condoned. If two students made exactly the same mistakes on an exam, there'd be an investigation, and consequences if it were found they'd cheated.
You don't want a world where being untrustworthy is easy to get away with and incentivized though, IMO. That contradicts your goal, since it means more people will decide to be untrustworthy.
That would be a valid reason to ask for a doctor's note. But even then I'd only do it if their absence is negatively impacting productivity and they're really needed at work. Or if there is something else in their performance I was concerned about.
Otherwise a lot of offices are basically empty at that time, so who cares? As long as they're not coming to work when they're actually sick so they can hoard sick days, does it matter?
:If your sick your sick,and you do not need a doctors note to take you sick time you just change it in your Amazon AtoZ. How you use your time is up to you.
Rachel-Amazon FC Ambassador
Employment is a business arrangement and both parties are merely obligated to fulfill the letter of the contract they have entered into - honorable or not. If the company hits hard times will "honor" keep them from getting rid of the employee who keeps getting sick? If the company allots a limited number of sick days, the employee is entitled to take them whenever they feel they can't be productive, for whatever reason.
Honor, responsibility, and sacrifice are important in personal relationships. You should still be honorable and reliable in your relationships with each individual within the company.
You're supposed to use sick days to take care of a sick dependent, too. Most single parents I've worked with always take all their allocated sick days because they use them when they're sick or when they have to stay home with a sick kid.
That definition varies by jurisdiction and (where not legally mandated) by company... But yes, it seems fair to allow sick time to be used for that purpose too instead of requiring them to spend vacation time.
No. His argument was "she only took 10 sick days, as many as our paid sick days policy", so he deduced she was faking it.
Such reasoning, especially when it affects promotion opportunities etc, is not just without proof, but also immoral, and punishable by law. At least in the civilized western world (Europe) it would be.
