Are you reading this at work? If so, well done

I learned reading Times that It’s National Sickie Day. But if staff are skiving off, it might be that their bosses should do more to show their appreciation Up and about, are you? Off to work? Congratulations! Tens of thousands are not, according to a sorrowful report from the employment law consultant Peter Mooney. The first Monday in February is apparently the peak day for employees calling in sick, many of them fraudulently. It’s dark and chilly; Christmas debt still hurts, Easter is far away. So in come the calls, croaking and faint even if only claiming a sprained knee, and down goes productivity. The story about National Sickie Day recurs every year, with the diligent Mr Mooney crunching the latest trends. The CBI avers that 12 per cent of absence is for faked reasons (some put it far higher, up to half), and that sickies amount to 21 million days and £1.6 billion lost every year (again, that is among the more moderate figures). Fake poorliness rises by 20 per cent during leading sporting fixtures, and is highest in the public sector: NHS employees and social care workers typically take off more than twelve days each a year, and police and probation officers just under ten (hotel and restaurant workers in the private sector take fewer than five). Mondays and Fridays remain the most popular days for skiving, which frankly shows a woeful lack of imagination; and apart from the public/private divide, the rule seems to be that the bigger the organisation and the more monotonous the work, the more it happens. Call centres are noted for it. This year, Mr Mooney’s new nugget is that more and more employees taking duvet days will be using text messages or e-mails to announce their absence: “It saves having your manager ask how exactly you’re feeling, what are the symptoms, how long will you be off.” It also, of course, saves your manager the tiresome necessity of pretending to believe you and to care, lest he or she be sued for hurt feelings, discrimination, failure to recognise employee stress etc. Bosses live in a dangerous world: even Simon Cowell is currently being taken to a tribunal by a self-righteous but appalling singer who claims, under the Disability Discrimination Act, that Britain’s Got Talent failed to make allowances for a medical condition that prevents her hearing that she’s out of tune. And three years ago a business magazine in the North West reported that a quarter of local businesses were so scared of being sued that they wouldn’t tackle staff who were perfectly well known to be pulling “sickies”. Reports over the years show recurring themes: frustrated employers, attempts to design software that spots patterns of serial skiving, rumours of lie-detector devices that employers can patch across the line when Croaking Charlie calls in on another wet Monday. Another thing that always features in the reports is some kindly expert explaining that the throwing of sickies is actually a good thing, because “if they do take that Monday off, it could prevent a build-up of stress”. The balancing quote is generally provided by a really stressed employer, or a colleague who is constantly being left waist-deep in alligators by a malingering workmate. Look around on the web or ask down the pub, and you will find plenty of advice on how to fake it: cough a bit and go quiet the day before, use the hoarseness of your hangover to good effect, make a note of what you said was wrong with you, never answer the phone in case your manager rings back and you forget to sound ill and try to avoid the obvious Mondays and Fridays (Thursday, apparently, is considered very convincing). Two consecutive days off are more realistic than one; never wear make-up or talk much on your first day back and — ah, the fiendish cunning! — make sure that you often sneeze and blow your nose at work with a brave smile, so that you get a reputation as someone who only takes sick leave when really incapacitated. It remains to be seen whether the recession and its terrors reduce malingering. Nor have I found any deep analysis of whether people on trial periods, vulnerable to dismissal, take as many sick days as protected staff. Freelances, paid per shift, certainly don’t. The anecdotal lore about duvet days points the finger equally at young party animals and the parents of small children. The latter, of course, are very vulnerable to real sick days: partly because children get ill, but also because having a toddler is like trekking through a fever-laden swamp. Their bugs are so vicious that one that debilitates a robust child for two days will wipe out each exhausted parent for five or six days more, and disable the au pair for a full week. Thus, one simple infant malady can disrupt a whole family for a month. But that’s another issue, and another reason why employers, for all their compulsory family-friendly veneer, secretly wish that their employees just wouldn’t breed. I suppose the ideal employee is a tough old bird with no dependants and a powerful sense of indispensability. That last word is the key. It isn’t all about idleness or hangovers. It’s about what work means to you. If you genuinely believe yourself to be useful, your role important and your boss and colleagues respectful, then you’re never going to throw a sickie. Unease, self-disgust and worry about the office outweigh minor fatigue or depression. Senior managers in the private sector famously soldier on even when they really shouldn’t, but even junior staff sometimes proudly force themselves in through snow, rail strikes and sniffles. If bosses have any sense, they show gratitude. That probably happens more in small companies and tight teams, and a lot less in vast call centres, factories and dysfunctional offices. So — while I hate to throw the ball back at employers in these hard times — if large numbers of your staff are croaking or texting “sick back tmrw” down the phone this morning it may not just be about them. It could be you.