Around 80% of the people who are currently employed have never abused their sick leave, or in other words, they have never called in sick instead of taking a day off, the results of Infostud’s latest research show. On the other hand, every fifth examinee rarely did do this when he or she “needed a break” or when the “vacation leave was not long enough”. Statistically speaking, that means that if the company has a hundred employees, 20 of them have probably, at one moment or the other, faked a sick leave.

Still a record number of 97% of people did not abuse their sick leave in 2008, Infostud’s research shows.

In the research, the website poslovi.infostud.com got the information about the consequences for those who do abuse their sick leave. Thus, more than three quarters of the survey participants (77%) has to bring an adequate doctor’s note so that sick leave could be officially justified. Every tenth employer does not check on when and how many days was the employee absent from work, while 13% of employees has a complete freedom when it comes to sick leaves.

The consequences are very different, show the results. For example, more than one third of the employers do not punish their workers in any way, while 23% of the examinees said that they get a note of warning only when they abuse too many days out of their sick leave. On the other hand, in one quarter of cases the punishment is felt when receiving the paycheck, while other  people get suspended. The number of people who get fired for sick leave abuse is not small either – this has happened to 17% of the examinees.

The reasons for sick leave abuse could be that 12% of the people who took the survey said that they do not even have a vacation leave. Almost half of them (45%) said that their vacation leave consists of considerably less days than the law states they should have. Moreover, 60% of people is not pleased with the way of how they can use their days off, because they can “use them only partially (few at a time)”. Interestingly enough, 12% of examinees does not have a paid vacation leave, while one third said that when they are on vacation they only get a part of their usual pay check.

The survey which was available from October to November of 2008 to the visitors of the poslovi.infostud.com website, was taken by 504 people.