More people are faking sick days, and employers are catching on

We've all done it, even if we may have felt at least a little guilty about it. But a new survey reveals that more of us are calling in sick to our jobs even if we're not, technically speaking, sick.

Maybe that's not particularly earth-shattering. But what's scary is that when employees do get busted for it, it's sometimes their own smartphones that betray them.

The wrap-up of sick-day trends comes from CareerBuilder, which reports 38 percent of U.S. employees have called in sick over the past year even though they weren't really sick, up from 28 percent last year.

The reasons employees gave for calling in sick, according to the survey: They had a doctor's appointment (27 percent); they just didn't feel like going to work (27 percent); they needed to relax (26 percent); they needed to catch up on sleep (21 percent); or the weather was bad (12 percent).

The survey also says that 33 percent of employers have tried to find out whether the employee was faking a sick day this past year, up from 31 percent last year. According to the survey, 67 percent of employers have asked to see a doctor's note and 49 percent have called the employee ("No, sir, that music is coming from the kids' TV ...").

Then, the survey says, about 22 percent of employers who caught an employee faking a sick day have fired the employee, up from 18 percent last year.

It turns out that your insatiable desire to let everybody you know what you're doing at every minute of the day also can do you in. The survey says 33 percent of employers have caught an employee lying about a sick day checking the employee's social media posts and that 26 percent of employers then have canned the employee.

Michele Tell-Woodrow, founder and CEO of Preferred Public Relations in Las Vegas, recalled an intern a few years ago who called in sick "and then started posting in her Facebook (account) that she was at the Fashion Show mall and at Target, and she might have been at Starbucks."

"The office was not angry," Tell-Woodrow adds. "We were really just kind of like, 'We just can't believe this.' "

"The moral of the story is, we ended up having an opening at Preferred PR," Tell-Woodrow says, and guess who didn't get the full-time gig?

See the full survey breakdown at www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/careerbuilders-annual-study-reveals-this-years-most-absurd-excuses-for-calling-in-sick-300159800.html.

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280 or follow @JJPrzybys on Twitter.