Employees seem to be taking sick leave from work in a more deliberate way than employers previously thought, new data has revealed.
The Oketz Systems company recently conducted a comparative survey that examined the number of sick days taken in Israel by people who work five days a week throughout 2022. In total, 6,547 paychecks and attendance data were examined.
According to the survey, 24.3% of employees presented a doctor's note in 2022 that was valid for Friday, and a similar amount (21.1%) submitted a note that was relevant for Saturday.
The data also showed that the number of sick notes for Sundays was at 18.2% while for Mondays, it was 17.9%. On the other hand, Wednesdays and Thursdays saw the least amount of doctor's notes at 6.4% and 6.9% respectively.
So what does this data reveal?
While it may seem at first glance that this is a random distribution of data, it has been determined otherwise.
Israel's sick leave law says that an employee who is absent from work due to sickness is entitled to receive 50% of their regular salary for the second and third day of their sick leave, but that on the first day they do not get paid
"The reality shows that employees who are interested in taking a day off [from work] but who don't want their salary to be cut go to the doctor on Sunday and claim they were sick since Friday and are still suffering from the illness," explains Oketz CEO Haim Molcho.
The employee then "requests retroactive sick leave starting from Friday so that they can be absent from work on Sunday and Monday as well," he adds.
According to Molcho, the current language of the law presents employers with a problematic situation in which employees are not obligated to present the diagnosis behind the sick leave to the employer.
He explains that it appears that most of the doctors who issue sick leave at the request of the patient, do not consider themselves "gatekeepers" on the issue of granting absences and ignore the devastating consequences that the absence of employees has on the employer and the economy.