Guilty until proven sick: How workplace culture, and personal stigmas, are pushing people to work through illnesses
Well, we workers are a curious bunch, aren’t we?
While a study by Pew Research earlier this year found that employed workers ranked paid time off for vacations, medical visits and minor illnesses as their most important job benefit, it turns out only about half of those folks end up using that time. And among those who don’t, half say they’re afraid if they used more paid time off, they’d fall too far behind on job responsibilities.
A new national survey conducted by Utah-based BambooHR unveils that there are even more factors, and disconnects, at play when it comes to why U.S. workers are increasingly hesitant to use paid time off to check out of work when they’re sick or simply need a mental health recovery day.
Almost 90% of the employees who participated in BambooHR’s poll, all of whom work full-time jobs, said they’ve worked through an illness in the past 12 months. And, 49% have done so multiple times and 15% report they keep working every time they’re sick.
At least a portion of the problem can be tracked back to who has paid sick time off and who doesn’t. A 2022 assessment of available employee benefits for U.S. workers, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that 77% of private industry employees have access to paid sick time, leaving almost a quarter of all workers without any paid sick time.
But among those who don’t suffer financial losses when they bow out of work to get feeling better, other pressures can come into play, according to BambooHR’s findings.
And those pressures can have both internal and external sources.
Related
Some 64% of workers who participated in BambooHR’s polling said they experience negative emotions when requesting sick time, including stress, anxiety, guilt or fear. And, 1 in 4 workers said they’ve been pressured by bosses to work when they’re sick or were explicitly asked to work through illnesses.
BambooHR’s head of human resources, Anita Grantham, said employees’ internal feelings of anxiety or guilt over taking time off as well as overt direction to work through sickness are both telltales of business leadership gone awry.
“These are reflections of leadership failures,” Grantham said. “When people aren’t clear about what you can count on and what you can’t, when you’ll be supported or when you won’t, leaders aren’t doing their job. And it promotes the idea of just working harder instead of working smarter.”
Turns out, employees want to find some reassurance when they look to their employers’ sick leave policies. They want to know what paid time off they can use, for what reasons and who is responsible for making the final decision.
And, response data collected by BambooHR in its assessment found U.S. workers want clear paid time off policies that allow for unquestioned sick leave, with nearly two thirds of poll participants, 63%, saying it’s their employer’s responsibility to mandate such a work culture.
But, those aspirations for clarity run into a wall in employees’ lived reality, with 75% of workers telling BambooHR that their company has unspoken rules about using sick time.
Exacerbating the murky waters of corporate sick leave policy is, according to BambooHR’s findings, a tendency among managers to cast a suspicious eye on underlings who make use of their paid sick time.
Even though the data reflects that an overwhelming majority of employees work through sickness, 77% of managers have suspected someone they manage has used sick leave without being physically ill.
BambooHR’s analysis finds that employees’ tendency to work while sick, their anxiety when requesting sick time, and managers suspecting them of faking it all reinforce an unhealthy culture around sickness and work.
Possibly picking up on their managers’ suspicions, 40% of workers feel insecure taking sick time because others may assume they’re faking it.
And other polling data reveals this insecurity is well founded. In addition to skeptical managers and human resource officers, people also face their colleagues’ judgment and disapproval.
One-third of workers who participated in BambooHR’s survey say they’ve been upset at co-workers for using sick time for reasons other than physical illness, compared to just 25% who are frustrated when co-workers come in when sick.
And, in a curmudgeonly twist, more than one third of workers say it’s inappropriate for a new employee to take sick leave during their first month on the job.
Grantham notes that all of the negative energy revealed in their survey about taking sick time seems to run counter to other evolutions wrought on the back end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Business owners, managers and employees all have a heightened awareness of the impacts of illness on the workplace. Many companies, Grantham said, have added new benefits or expanded existing benefits to build better support for employees who need to take time off to recover and also worked to build out more robust wellness programs aiming to help keep employees both physically and mentally healthy.
But, on the flip side of those changes, the broader workplace dynamic has been inexorably changed, with many more employees across business sectors doing their work from home every day or for at least part of the work week. And this is an environment, Grantham said, that contributes to the work-through-it mentality.
“The remote situation post-COVID-19 has made (managing sick leave policies) worse,” Grantham wrote in an analysis of the survey results. “You can be at home and still be on work calls. But working when ill doesn’t serve the person, the company, or the customer.”
Grantham said the key to elevating workplace culture, and employee experiences, when it comes to sick leave is a matter of sound policy but more pointedly falls on the shoulders of business leaders.
“The best leaders model the behavior they want to see, and support, in the workplace,” Grantham said. “Real change lies within leaders ... who need to constantly ask themselves, ‘Am I building the kind of company and workplace that I would want to be a part of as an employee?’”
