| Even the least avid football fan can get caught up in the excitement during the Word Cup, and will try hard to make sure they don’t miss a match. But what if they are scheduled to work when their team are playing? With the World Cup taking place in the Americas, the timings of matches vary considerably and can impact on regular office hours as well as those working late or night shifts.
Some employees may be tempted to “pull a sickie”, so what can employers do about that? Well, one thing you can do is to remind staff that they need to follow the correct absence notification procedure. If you don’t currently require staff to phone in and speak personally to a manager, you may want to introduce that now, even as a temporary measure. A phone call can make it much harder for someone to swing the lead, compared with sending a text. You can then quiz them about the nature of their illness and if suspicious you could even point out that their absence coincides with a match and ask them are they genuinely ill. However, you need to be careful not to go too far and accuse them of lying, as that could potentially lead to conflict and even result in constructive dismissal.
Return to work interviews can also be effective in making people think twice about going off sick. If you don’t currently carry them out, then you could introduce that to your procedures. A face to face meeting with your line manager on the day you return from sickness absence can be tricky if you have been lying about the reason for absence.
A bit of detective work can also be effective when it comes to challenging staff about absence – it never ceases to amaze me the number of employees who go off “sick” only to post themselves on social media out partying!
Another way of pre-empting such issues is to talk to your staff to see who wants to take time off to watch the matches and see if that can be accommodated in advance through shift changes, etc.
Please let us know if you need any further guidance with this issue or would like to update your policies. |
