Picture the scene: You arrive home late from work, again. You’re exhausted and searching for something to eat when the phone rings. A very excited friend blurts out: “I've got two free tickets right behind home plate at the game tomorrow afternoon! Come on, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!” You say yes right away, thinking that you’ll figure something out with the office.

You’re out of vacation time and have burned through all your personal days, too—but you still have eight days of sick leave. You think about how much work you’ve done in the past few weeks, and all the long hours replay in your head. “It’s no big deal,” you say to yourself.

The next morning, you call the office and give your boss’s assistant your most pathetic voice: “I’m not well today; don’t think I’d do you guys much good if I came in.”

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Is there an ethics issue in how American workers view the using what traditionally was known as “sick leave”—paid days off for when an employee (or family member) is too ill to come into work and function properly?

Many companies have clear written policies that distinguish between a “vacation day” and a “sick day.” One is for leisure activity, the other for illness. Over time, this arrangement has been augmented by a few paid “personal days” to be used when you close on a new home or need to attend a wedding or funeral (the idea being to not “waste” your leisure or sick time for such purposes).

At the Ethics Resource Center, we thought those distinctions were clear. This summer, in a survey gauging the prevalence of common workplace ethics violations, we asked 3,452 employees at organizations of all sizes: “Have you observed employees at your company calling in sick when they were not during the past 12 months?”

Thirty-six percent said they had.

We found that behavior most prevalent among local government workers; 40.3 percent in that category had known a colleague who took sick leave when he wasn’t actually ill. Employees of publicly traded companies were second, at 37.2 percent, followed by non-profit organizations (36.7 percent), state government (36.4 percent), privately held companies (35.6 percent), and the federal government (25.8 percent).

Diane Stafford of The Kansas City Star reported our findings in her “Workspace” column just before Labor Day. She offered her view that, “To be fair, abuse of sick day policies could be considered in context with the employee benefit plan that’s in place. Abuse of a generous paid time off plan might be viewed more harshly than ‘calling in sick’ to an employer that offers no paid time off benefits. Sometimes, the reality is that personal and family needs conflict with work duties.”

Some of her readers had a starker view. In a follow-up column soon afterward, based on e-mails and letters, Stafford declared that reaction from readers was universal: It was not an ethical abuse. “The view of many was that if an employee benefits package includes paid sick days, such days are part of the compensation package and it would be folly to let them sit unused.”

Some expressed the view that “the sick day concept is outdated.” For instance, some benefit plans give workers a certain number of paid days (or hours) off during the year. Whether the time off is taken for a long-planned vacation, a “mental health” day, or because one truly is too ill to get out of bed doesn’t matter.

Others flatly declared that use of “sick leave” just isn’t an ethics issue. “I think it’s bizarre to consider sick time an issue of ethics,’” one Star reader wrote. “Workers ought to be entitled—and trusted—to decide when to use sick days; it’s none of the employers’ business. Often there is no other way for people to care for their family or personal needs.”

Another writer noted that his wife’s benefits policy allows her to bank up to 100 days of unused sick days. But when she retires, she will be paid only for 25. “What is the wisdom of losing 75 days’ worth of paid benefits?” he asked. Stafford noted that she had not received any thoughts on the column from managers.

Clearly, some of Stafford’s readers have in mind a definition of “ethics” that differs from mine—and, I hope, yours.

Webster’s Dictionary defines ethics as: “the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation.”

At the ERC, we look at ethics as any behavior by one person or group that affects others. Such a broad view of “ethical behavior” is the only way institutions build an ethical culture. If you don’t consider ethics in all of your decision making, you get bogged down in “situational ethics,” focused primarily on staying out of trouble by trying to draw a line to explain why some particular instance does or does not pose an ethical dilemma.

Ethics involves everything that goes on in your workplace. Unethical behavior occurs not just when the bosses decide as a group to engage in unfair business practices on a large scale (as in the Enron fiasco); ethics also is embedded in “the little things” that are part of everyday life on the job.

When one person is out of the office, that invariably puts additional burdens on coworkers—somebody has to take up the slack. We all understand that colleagues will be absent when they are ill or there has been a death in the family. And we don’t begrudge them vacation time; we all want, and need, to relax on the beach! On those days, we willingly take up that slack. That is why organizations provide paid vacations, sick days, and personal days, and why they build in systems to have one person’s work covered by another when necessary.

But when someone stays out of work unnecessarily, with no warning, he or she is abusing the system. And abusing their coworkers—by unexpectedly dumping additional work into other people’s laps.

All of this should serve as a reminder to managers of the constant need to reinforce to their employees the elements of ethical behavior—to make sure they understand that ethical issues are confronted every day, from the organization’s top to bottom levels, from big-picture issues of corporate social responsibility to the little things like abusing the sick leave policy. It is the best way to increase ethical conduct in our organizations.

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