When does ‘making the time up’ go from fair to fanciful?
I think I know the answer, following some communication with a club this week.
The club in question had an employee who’d been off sick five days a month, every single month since December last year.
In terms of the employee’s contract, she’s only eligible for Statutory Sick Pay, but the club agreed she could ‘make the time up’, which means she’s been getting a full pay packet for the last seven months.
Now, ‘making the time up’ was vaguely realistic (albeit a little optimistic) in month one.
By month two, it was fanciful, and sitting here in month eight, it’s farcical.
She’s clocked up 30 days at full pay, which means she’d need to conjure up close to two additional months of work from somewhere.
Unsurprisingly, the penny has now dropped, hence them getting in touch with us.
Helpfully, they have no paper trail to account for any of the absences – no self-certification or Fit Note – as well as allowing her to report absence via WhatsApp messages, voicenotes and photos, which isn’t their official procedure.
Our first step was to let the employee know that they would only be paid SSP for July and needed to complete the self-certification form.
The next step will be to accurately work out how much she has been overpaid and deduct that from her pay over the next few months.
Which she’s unlikely to be happy about!
Being generous or helpful with employees who are off sick might feel like the right thing to do, but a word of warning – over many years, I’ve seen that overdelivering can create a level of entitlement that it’s hard to row back from.
And, in the worst of both worlds, you’re unlikely to get the overpayment back, or any gratitude for having made it in the first place!
