End of the sickie as bosses find a way of spying on slackers
COMPUTER snoops could mean the day of the "sickie" could soon be over.
Legal experts have invented software to help bosses spy on slackers.
It can also track patterns in workers' absences - singling out those who always seem to fall ill with the mysterious "lurgy" on Mondays and Fridays.
And it will give bosses a step-by-step guide to taking legal action if they want to sack a serial sickie taker. A survey revealed 88 per cent of firms would take action against workers who skip too many days, but they are scared of ending up before an expensive employment tribunal.
The software, that took £600,000 to develop, even calculates just how much each worker's absenteeism is costing the company.
A Government survey recently revealed that 176 million sick days are taken every year, costing more than £11.6 billion. Nearly one in 10 of these - or 17 million - is due to a hangover after a heavy night out.
In the run-up to Christmas alone more than one million workers were estimated to have taken an extra day off work by calling in sick.
Urgent
The new software alerts employers as to whether they are in the clear, have a legal issue which needs addressing, or whether they need to take urgent legal action to solve a potential crisis.
According to a survey by Employment Law Advisory Services, one in four small and medium-sized enterprises has far more staff throwing "sickies" than it has taken action against.
But almost nine out of 10 businesses said they would discipline their workers if they were legally confident in doing so. The software then guides them through the correct disciplinary procedures.
"Many companies these days are so convinced that employment law is weighted on the side of employees that they are afraid to tackle what are serious issues in the workplace," said Peter Mooney, head of consultancy at ELAS.
"This survey shows that for a large number of businesses, that means suffering at the hands of lazy workers rather than face up to issues such as excess absenteeism.
"They are so scared that they will end up in court for tackling an issue head on, that they sit back and suffer when they don't need to."
Figures from the Healthcare Commission show that nurses take more days off sick than any other group in the public services.
On average, they take 16.8 sock days off a year compared with an average of 11.3 across seven other areas of public service, including the police, the prison service, Civil Service and teaching.
This is in contrast to the private sector where workers take an average of 6.8 days off sick a year.
