Why paid sick leave pays off

When the federal government mandated 10 days per year of sick leave late last year, it was good news for federally regulated employees.

But other than B.C., Quebec and P.E.I. — which also legislated leave for provincially regulated workers in the past — many workers today remain without any coverage. 

For one labour expert, this represents a lost opportunity that was particularly illustrated during the pandemic.

“I thought the pushback against paid sick days that we saw by some business lobbies was misguided on a number of fronts. There was strong evidence, strong research to suggest that there was a very good business case for paid sick days,” says Simon Black, associate professor, labour studies at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont.

“It was unfortunate that at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, this is when that business case for paid sick days should have been made perhaps more strongly by the labour movement.”

While many governments pushed for employers to provide time off during the pandemic, that has now lapsed.

Stats show limited paid sick leave

A recent Statistics Canada study showed that around one-third of Canadian workers have no paid sick leave, which suggest there is more work to do to prevent future large-scale shutdowns, says Black.

“Are we going to wait until the next pandemic to have these policies in place? Because what we saw at the beginning of COVID-19 [is] we didn’t learn the lessons from the SARS pandemic. Outbreaks in particular sectors, whether it was meatpacking or warehousing and manufacturing, those outbreaks possibly could have been prevented if, going into that pandemic as of January 2020, there were 10 paid sick days on the books already,” he says.

“Who knows how many lives would have been spared?”

Sick leave policies should be modernized to reflect today’s hybrid and remote realities, says another HR leader.

Benefits to offering sick leave

For one technology company, offering paid sick leave is a way to show the workforce that they are appreciated.

“We value their health first and foremost so that has been something that’s been super-important for us since the get-go; essentially, physical and mental health for our staff takes precedence and, definitely, I think our staff feel it,” says Cassie Van Tol-Walker, HR manager at Safe Software in Surrey, B.C.

“We’re really big on mental and physical health for our staff. Folks can use sick days for mental health reasons or to attend appointments or if they are physically sick so for us, that lumps into an overall physical and mental health benefit.”

With turnover being a real concern at many organizations, offering time off can pay dividends, she says.

“I think it definitely goes a long way in terms of goodwill with staff when you’re prioritizing not only their health potentially when they have a sick child or they have to go to multiple appointments. Trust goes both ways: if you’re putting trust in your employees, they’re going to trust you to honour your benefits and abide by them.”

“I wouldn’t say that people come to us saying, ‘Safe has a great sick leave policy. I want to work from them,’ but it was definitely something that people asked about and definitely informs the overall benefits package,” says Van Tol-Walker.

By reducing turnover, “businesses are able to retain knowledgeable, dedicated, and hopefully well-trained staff,” says Black.

“That’s very important: turnover costs are on average at least 20% of the level of workers’ wages and it can be up to 200% and businesses can take a lot of time to recruit and train and let an employee work their way up the learning curve to full productivity and those costs in terms of training can be pretty steep for a business. Being able to retain staff is very important, and paid sick days all have a positive impact on staff retention, reduction of turnover, and overall productivity.”

How to offer paid sick leave

In order to come up with the best policy, a number of steps should be taken, says Van Tol-Walker and this begins with dialogue.

“With any of our benefit programs, we as an HR team do a bit of research around best practices in our industry, and internal pulse surveys as well, to gather information on what is most important to our staff. So from there, we discussed with the HR team: ‘What would really move the needle for our staff that they would value?’ And so we take a combination of our staff sentiment and best practice in the industry.”

“It’s having that constant dialogue with your team, to understand really what’s going on for them, and what is most important for them, so that open-door policy [is] super important but practicing what you preach and having some conversations with your staff.”

As a tech company, they also need to be cognizant that talent attraction can be fierce so care needs to be taken to get it right.

“We put together a bit of a proposal to our cofounders around what we saw would be best for employee satisfaction and retention for us, and so that’s typically our process there,” says Van Tol-Walker.

When it comes to offering time off, employers should be aware that competing types of true coverage can exist and it’s important to educate the workforce, according to Black.

Legally workers may have sick time off but if they aren’t aware of this, this is problematic, he says.

“Legal coverage means laws like labour standards, occupational health and safety laws, in which workers are covered, and effective coverage being the degree to which workers are both aware of these laws; they’re aware of their rights and are willing to take up and enact their rights in the workplace.”

“Even with paid sick days, even when they’re on the books like in B.C., there hasn’t been a great deal of effort by governments to let workers know that they have these laws on the books,” he says.

Is sick leave abused by workers?

Some employers may argue that abuse might be commonplace if too much time off is offered.

But Black says he hasn’t seen much evidence for abuse, “and I think the StatsCan data parrots the fact that so few workers are actually taking up the sick days.”

Instead, this points to the need for different forms of leave, he says. 

“If a worker has a sick child, or an employee is taking care of an elderly mother or dad who’s suffering with dementia, then that employee might take a paid sick day — but that’s in the absence of having an emergency, family-leave policy.”

“If anything, the abuse of paid sick days, it’s an abuse that might have happened as a result of not having access to proper leave, like family leave or emergency leave,” says Black.