What is leaveism?
You may have heard of absenteeism and perhaps even presenteeism, but the newest term on the block is leaveism.
Leaveism is defined by Dr Ian Hesketh and Professor Cary Cooper (2014) as:
Employees utilising allocated time off such as annual leave entitlement, flexi hours etc, to take time off when they are in fact unwell;
Employees taking work home that cannot be completed in normal working hours;
Employees working while on holiday to catch up.
They point out that “to rely solely on traditional sickness absence as being the indicator for performance management does not present a full and an accurate picture of the overall well-being of the workforce.” Mind & Mission believe that absence should never be an indicator for performance (but that’s for another article).
The research showed that workload is by far the main cause of stress at work resulting in the working practices described above. In other words, workloads are so high that employees cannot complete their work in the time contracted by their employers.
The days of holidays being holidays are very much muddied now, with many employees being effectively ‘on-call’ throughout holiday periods. How is this good for our mental health? Obviously it is not.
What this means is that employers must start to look beyond pure absence rates to understand what is driving employee behaviour, health and wellbeing. In fact they need to look inwards at outdated HR policies which drive these behaviours and make changes that represent their own culture and values.
The fundamental concept of employment is that an employee attends work at a specific place, for a specific time as agree in a contract. Simply defined, absence is the “state of being away from a place or person”. Those waters are now muddied by hybrid or remote working practices.
Employees do have certain rights and can by law take leave for different reasons, these include:
Maternity or other parental leave
Trade union activities
Time off during notice of redundancy to seek new work
Time off for performance of health and safety duties or employee representative
Public service duties such as jury duty
Workplace absence can be for authorised or non-authorised reasons. The most common authorised absence is holiday. Normally a contract of employment will specify the number of days an employee is permitted to take for holidays and perhaps compassionate leave or other extenuating circumstances.
Absence due to sickness is normally unauthorised absence. Employer policy varies greatly concerning payment whilst sick, from nothing i.e., only statutory sick pay (SSP) to receiving full pay for a certain period, sometimes up to 6 months. Perhaps these policies are one of the fundamental reasons for leaveism.
All people policies have an impact on the mental health of employees. Some might say that considering attendance to be a key performance attribute is somewhat outdated. We would agree. It time to change to consider the needs of the business alongside the needs of the employee and work together on policy.