Every winter there are reports and statistics released about employees who drag their sorry selves into work even though they are too sick to get any work done. The results are always negative. Productivity hits rock bottom, other employees get sick and the illness undoubtedly lasts longer when employees haul their heavily-medicated bodies to their desk. So why do they keep doing it?

The answer typically lies with their managers and the working environment. Employees are still getting the message that although technically they are allowed sick days, it is greatly frowned upon. And never mind so-called "mental" health days. This could be because a few bad apples who always take off Fridays or Mondays have made bosses suspicious of absent employees.

But HR experts agree that this kind of environment leads to burned out employees who end up costing the company even more in long-term leave and medical costs. Macadamian is one company that has heard the message. Voted as one of Ottawa HR's top 10 employers of 2006, the software engineering and outsourcing firm has decided to let employees have a little breathing room with flexible schedules and extra days off. Macadamian HR specialist Virginie Bastien and Matthew Hately, vice-president of marketing, spoke to OBJ about their policies on absenteeism in their workplace.

OBJ: What sort of policies do you have in place when it comes to absenteeism?

BASTIEN: With sick leave we don't have a limit of sick days. If we judge that an employee is taking too many days off, we raise it with that employee.

We also have some what we call "Mac days" which are free days every month when there are no other long weekends, like February, March or April – depending on Easter – June and November. So those are extra days that employees can take to have long weekends every month of the year. We are also closed between Christmas and New Year's so that is an extra week that employees have to take time off.

OBJ: What do you do to keep employee and employer communication open when difficult issues arise?

BASTIEN: We have a program that we call Confluence on the intranet where we publish our mission and our values, the project we are working on. We share a lot of information on Confluence so we always keep information open. And we also have bi-weekly status where we give the status to everyone on information like sales, marketing, IT.

We always practice and open door policy, so if anyone has anything they want to say to their managers, we are open to ideas and communication between managers and employees

HATELY: And I think that we try really hard ... to over-communicate. We make sure to communicate our vision and goals and we make sure to tell employees what's happening in the company on the sales side and the finances of the company. And I think it creates an atmosphere that makes people more comfortable to come to their managers and talk to them when issues arise. I'm just thinking about a few instances in the last few years when people felt comfortable saying "I have this issue in my life right now and I need an extra couple of days." As long as someone is open and comes to us before we really don't worry about an extra day here or there.

OBJ: How you deal with employees who might need to have extra accommodations to be able to keep working without taking too much time off because of other issues in their lives?

BASTIEN: We have a policy where employees can work from home one day per week if they want to, for whatever reason. Also, our core-business hours are pretty flexible. People can come to work any time before 10 a.m. and leave anytime after 3 p.m. And if people have a difficult situation that they are dealing with, we also have the open door policy to speak to their manager and we can re-arrange their work schedule for a period of time.

OBJ: High tech tends to be a bit of a pressure cooker where employees can work long hours with little time off. How do you counter-act that?

HATELY: That's a cultural thing. Sure, there will always be times where people have to do sprints once in a while and for those times we give time in lieu. I started here nine years ago and right from the onset, we said we're not going to have that culture. A lot of us came from companies where people were expected to be there until 11 p.m. And never mind that people were doing their online banking and going out for long dinners, and they're rewarded for that? We said right away that we're not going to have that. Sure, we have to work hard a lot of the time, and you have to put in some extra hours every now and then, but not for months at a time.

It's give and take. If you trust people and treat them like adults, we find that they act that way in return. If you start to baby people and put a bunch of strict rules in place you get the opposite behaviour.

BASTIEN: In my case, I worked in an environment that was the complete opposite of the environment here. I think that this type of environment is good to increase the productivity of people.

OBJ: There seems to be a certain mentality that if an employer has to accommodate an employee in these ways, it is just easier to find another one to replace him or her with one that is "less trouble." What is the mentality at Macadamian?

HATELY: I'm trying to think if there has ever been a case like that. It would have to be very, very extreme, like (an employee) just not showing up. With the business we're in, we're a heavily people-centric business. When we hire somebody, it's because we really want them. We'll be pretty flexible before we say 'this just isn't working out.' We really want to keep the people that we have because the talent is hard to find.

THE EXPERTS SAY

Companies have to have policies in place to work with their employees to address any issues that they may have that prevents them from attending work regularly. I have seen many employers who have programs in place which take a constructive approach associated with absenteeism. It's misguided for employers to view these programs as tools to punish employees. But if they recognize that there is a role for employers to assist employees in attending work regularly, the results can be remarkable.

This is a significant issue in today's workplace and will continue to become an even more important issue in future years because of the degree in which it impacts on productivity. It is going to be a reduction in the number of available workers to take on the challenges of the knowledge-based economy that we are heading into.

Policies can identify employees who have encountered difficulties in meeting their obligations and where employers can work with them to address the issues keeping them from work. Some of those strategies can include making sure employees have access to medical resources, providing homecare or senior care. While there are limits on direct intervention that employers can take, there are indirect approaches that can assist employees.

The employer who is going to succeed in tomorrow's economy cannot overlook the importance of addressing absenteeism in the workplace for the good of their employees as well as their bottom line.

Lynn Harnden, Emond Harnden LLP, specializing in employment law

Chronic absenteeism slows production, and for a lot of the other staff it typically means they work harder and incur overtime costs. That person has to be replaced. It really puts additional pressure on other employees too.

There are two kinds of absenteeism. The long term absenteeism costs the company for the hours lost before it goes to insurance and then they have to replace the worker. In my line of work, I have seen some of those people go on to work another job on the side while collecting benefits from their first job.

My experience has been that companies have policies and procedures that they can fall back on, but the ultimate responsibility really falls onto the front-line management. There are good managers and bad managers. If someone is regularly calling in sick and they don't believe them anymore, they need to deal with it. Sometimes they make it too easy. For example, I would never allow someone to call in and leave a voice mail saying that they are staying home, it's just too easy. If you're one of those managers who just says, "OK, thanks for calling," you need to be more on top of it.

Not all of them are fraudulent, however. People do get sick. The trust needs to be there until the trust is broken.

History has also shown that people who participate in the stock ownership of their company are less likely to be absent. That's one example of a positive incentive.

Darrell Booth, president of Glencastle Security Inc., specializing in corporate fraud investigations