Losing money to sick leave

Businesses are losing lots of money on sick leave and many of them don't realize it. Paid sick leave is a great incentive to offer your employees and studies have found that it increases job satisfaction. Employees like having sick leave because they can get a day off work to care for their loved ones that have fallen ill or they can care for themselves if they have fallen ill. While sick leave is a great benefit, there are several people that abuse it. Several employees will treat sick leave like paid time off and they will use it as they please. To combat this, you can start asking your employees to provide documentation of their illness like a doctor's note. This may sound like you are a teacher, but sometimes you have to be a micro-manager if you want to cut down on sick leave abuse.

Statistics found that in 1997, 56 percent of medium to large businesses provided paid sick leave to their full-time employees as a benefit. Currently, companies have the choice to provide paid sick leave to full-time employees, part-time employees, hourly employees, or any combination of the three. Among those companies surveyed, the average number of annual paid sick leave days ranged from 11.2 days after one year of service to 21.1 days after 25 years of service. The average number of sick days used per year by a salaried exempt employee is 3.8 days.Salaried nonexempt employees were found to use and average of 5.6 days. Whereas the non-union hourly employees were found to use an average of 4.8 days and union hourly employees were found to use a high average of 5.5 days per year. Employees that struggle with obesity or are smokers are also found to use more sick leave days than their healthy co-workers.So now you need to add up how much you pay in sick leave benefits and times that by your salaried employees, hourly employees, etc. This cost will add up fast! Most companies are paying out about 13 hours of free time per employee for sick leave benefits.

Since you are already paying the employee that is home with an illness, you still need to add in the costs of the employees that will cover their shift. Do you need to bring in a temporary employee to do their job? How about asking other employees to multi-task and cover their job while they are out. This can lead to a loss in production costs, which adds up fast.

Cutting out sick leave entirely is detrimental to your business. You will actually lose more money when you cut sick leave benefits because you will have some long-time employees that will search for a new job. You now have the costs of hiring and training a new employee if you lose someone. In addition to training costs, you will lose money in production costs. What happens to you when you get a cold? Chances are that you sit him with a box of Kleenexes and you look for any remedy you can. Most people spend more time sleeping since this is one of the best things you can do to get rid of a cold. If your employees are forced to come into the office, they will be drowsy and their production will slow. This can cause other employees to slow down and before you know it, you are losing more money than you are making.

Another bad part about cutting sick leave is that the un-healthy employee will infect everyone else at the company. It doesn't mean that everyone will get sick but you will have at least one more person that is ill and unable to properly perform their job duties.