Sick Days Rewards

Employee satisfaction can be complicated. It's not a matter of giving everyone a raise or a bonus and expecting it to pay off. You need to carefully evaluate your workplace and try as many little things as possible to see what ultimately leads to the best result.

Many industries can do this by changing the way they work with sick days. Currently, sick days are considered separate from paid vacations. Employees only get a sick day when they call in sick, and if they don't take their sick days they lose them.

Sick days are a part of a company's budget and a "perk" of being an employee. So it seems strange that most companies have the "use it or lose it strategy" for something so important to the company. Perhaps there is another way that your company can reward sick days to employees, such as allowing them to be transferred to vacation time, paying out unused sick days at the end of the year, allowing them to accumulate indefinitely and "cashed out" like a forced savings account and so on. There can easily be some type of rewards program for not using sick days, because while you don't want any employees to come in to work sick, how you work with sick days does have the potential to improve employee satisfaction.

If your company is one that uses the "use it or lose it" strategy for sick days, there can be several benefits to changing it to something more advantageous for the employee. The greatest benefit is the ability for it to aid in employee satisfaction. Obviously the greatest benefit is the financial benefit it has for the employee.

No longer will the sick days that they earned through their hard work and lack of illness be lost. Recall that the "use it or lose it" strategy is actually punishing employees for not being sick. Employees that managed to stay healthy and didn't abuse their sick day privileges are having these days that they earned taken away from them, as if to say "thank you for washing your hands and coming into work.

We're rewarding you by taking away the money we set aside for you and keeping it for ourselves." It's a slap in the face that will affect employee satisfaction. We'll continue this topic in the next article.