Over a third of Danes call in sick when they’re not

Dansk Erhverv calculated that Danish companies lose 814 million kroner due to people calling in sick

May 6, 2014

A new survey compiled by YouGov for Metroxpress newspaper has shown that 38 percent of Danes have called in sick when they haven’t been.

Some 16 percent said they’d ‘pulled a sickie’ once, while the same percentage said that they’d done it a couple times. A further five percent said that they do it often, while 61 percent said that they had never done it.

“It’s really bad form,” Rikke B Ørum, the HR head for business advocates Dansk Erhverv, told Metroxpress.

”Skiving is expensive to society and the companies when there is work that isn’t done. But it is also disloyal to one's colleagues because in many cases they have to pick up the slack.”

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Rewarding hard workers
A previous Dansk Erhverv calculation showed that Danish companies lose 814 million kroner every year due to people calling in sick when they’re not and Henning Jørgensen, a labour market researcher at Aalborg University, said that the public sector has installed bonus initiatives for employees who rarely miss work.

“Councils and hospitals have departments where you get more wages if you have a low absence rate,” Jørgensen said. “And that has actually had a great effect.”

Interestingly, a recent survey by the analysis institute Wilke for Avisen.dk showed that women have taken more sickies than men over the past year – 13 percent compared to 8 percent.

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