Does being on sick leave affect your chances of another job?

Martynt74

Martynt74

Martynt74

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Joined
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Hondon de las Nieves, Spain
My wifes company is absolutely useless. She's having a lot of issues with the CEO's daughter being promoted and being given a lot of responsibility despite making a lot of mistakes. My wife was her manager but was told she couldn't treat her as a regular employee so couldn't take action to actually address the issues and so just had to keep resolving the issues along with fielding complaints from the rest of the business about their dealings with this person.

My wife raised concerns to her manager, and the results have been that she's been moved to now report directly to the CEO who predictably shoots her down at every point. This change coincided with the daughter being promoted to the same level as my wife.

At the same time, most of the employees have been given pay cuts and salaries reduced. This was referred to as being for loss of business, however a recent email has stated the actual reason is that the CEO/MD have bought out their sister company and the reductions have enabled them to do this.

Over the last month things have got worse, whereby the CEO's daughter is passing work over to my wife that has nothing to do with her and is mainly reconciliation based stuff that my wife was trying to get her to do over the last 18 months to help reduce her mistakes. The CEO then basically agrees with all this.

It's causing my wife a lot of stress and so whilst she's currently looking for a new job (along with most other staff at the company who are fed up with the management), i've encouraged her to go to the doctors about stress and go on sick leave. She only gets SSP but i feel it's worth it for her health as things are only going to get worse and worse.

However she's concerned that being on sick leave with stress might then impact her ability to get work. Particularly as she's in a difficult position where she's disabled with chronic fatigue and so requires home based working. For reference, prior to this, she's been employed since July 2017 and hasn't had a single day off sick.

Anyone have any thoughts? Worst case is that she just hands in her notice and we deal with the loss of income. It'd be tight, but manageable, but then she has the potential gap on her CV to explain.
 
Marvt74 said:
Worst case is that she just hands in her notice and we deal with the loss of income. It'd be tight, but manageable, but then she has the potential gap on her CV to explain.
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This wouldn't help matters when discussing it with a potential new employer, and/or being on leave due to stress. Employers ask about gaps on a CV so that they understand the reasons behind them, telling them she quit because of a change in work environment is likely to get mixed reactions from different people. Some will understand, others will judge too quickly.

If you're serious about moving on I would stick to it for the time being but do everything possible to get out of there as quickly as possible. It's an awful situation to find yourself in and wish your wife the best on her search for new employment.
 
Cheers

She's holding off at the moment, she's getting herself down a little as she's had quite a bit of interest, but most jobs which state remote working are only temporary until March whereas she needs permanent remote.

She may not have a job to go to soon though. As mentioned where there's a lot of issues at the top which has annoyed all the staff. Out of around 15 staff, 3 of them have handed their notice in within a week of each other. 2 of which are very important. With at least 3 others currently actively looking and i imagine that will increase as more people jump ship.

If all these people leave i'm not sure how they'll cope. Especially due to the time of year, i can't see them getting any replacements till March time and then lots of the more capable people have left and so the new recruits will be trained by people who have no clue.

My concern at this point is how much they'll try and dump onto my wife to try and manage. Yesterday they asked her to increase her hours back which she's refused, but it's hard to know how much more pressure they'll put on her as more people leave.
 
mid_gen said:
Why would you tell prospective employers about your sickness record? I have never done this, or been asked.
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Some employers ask to contact your doctor for medical records. You don't have to grant permission for it, but it does happen and they may discount you if you say no. My current employer did this check too.
 
Hades said:
Some employers ask to contact your doctor for medical records. You don't have to grant permission for it, but it does happen and they may discount you if you say no. My current employer did this check too.
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Yikes, is that legal? I have never come across this anywhere, in the UK or abroad....
 
mid_gen said:
Yikes, is that legal? I have never come across this anywhere, in the UK or abroad....
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It's not illegal as far as I know. You don't have to agree to it though. I guess legally they can't discriminate against you if you don't agree to it. But they could just find "another" reason to withdraw the offer.

I also had to sign an opt out form for my rights to the working time directive. Legally they can't force you to do it. But in reality they also don't have to offer you the job. Technically I could opt back in at any time... if I didn't want any future prospects.
 
Can your wife maybe apply for a different role within the same company or ask for a side move to get away from this person causing them all the stress?

Personally I'd say she's better off sticking at it and looking for alternative employment elsewhere. SSP is also a pitiful amount although you have mentioned you don't care about this and I sympathise. If she truly does want to get away sick leave for stress never looks good. Reason being it's the most common one along with bad backs that is impossible to disprove so essentially you get a lot of people abusing it. If you were an employer and you saw sick leave for stress on a record it's would be a big red flag. Your wife could try and explain but then they would say she's incompetent as she was faced with a problem and failed to manage it appropriately to the point she decided to bail on them. If she truly does want to leave then I'd try and apply for anything and everything even a lesser role if need be from where she can progress. Going on sick leave gives me no doubt it would make her chances of finding alternative employment significantly worse and it could completely tarnish any reputation she currently has with her current employer for the same reasons it will with others. Stress is used by all the chancers to get paid time off work and to get an easier life when they return to work.
 
mid_gen said:
Why would you tell prospective employers about your sickness record? I have never done this, or been asked.
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A common interview question is to be asked if there are any reasons or illnesses affecting you that would impact your ability to do the role.

If it is recorded in interview that you say no to this, and then get offered a job and it later comes to light that you lied in the interview, it can be considered gross miss conduct.
 
Well various things have happened since the OP. 3 people have handed their notice in and are in the process of leaving. It seems like the 2 owners are seeing this as a benefit for their pockets and don't seem to be intending to replace them. One of which was the person my wife reported to who from my impressions did a lot of the work managing both Finance and Customer facing teams. Her leaving has made a lot of people panic as she covered for them a lot and so they're not concerned they'll be exposed.

My wife had a really long discussion with one of the owners just before Christmas, it felt quite positive in that she accepted a lot of my wifes frustrations and seemed to suggest things would change to split the 2 areas and talked at length about the things they wanted my wife to do moving forward. Then the next day she sent a big long email out which seemed to go completely against everything that was discussed and talked of further collaboration between my wife and the CEO's daughter which just doesn't seem possible. I think the reasoning is that they don't trust the daughter to be able to do these things herself, but want her involved so she feels important. I can't see any other reason. The problem is that the company isn't big enough to carry someone like that.

We had a good chat about all this over Christmas, we were both off for around 16 days in total and it was clear to see the change in her mental state as things got closer to going back to work. We decided that whilst we can afford her to leave completely it's not ideal for various reasons.

We drafted an email stating the stress that work is causing and asked for her role to be moved to one of just admin level. In theory this would ease things where she wouldn't be expected to do a lot of the more senior stuff she wants. It would also remove there being 2 Finance Managers despite the whole team only having 4 people in (including the managers!). The downside to this is that the CEO's daughter would certainly then become my wifes manager and who knows what she would then ask of her.

In theory we're hoping this might then reduce some of the stress and she would just be in a role where she can get her head down, do her tasks without piles of re-organisation tasks being dumped on her. I'm not sure it will work but hopefully it'll help reduce stress until she can find something else. Worst case scenario is she just hands her notice in and we deal with it. Spending time going through our spending and we're pretty crap with money and spend it because we can afford to on things we don't particularly need. Over the last 6 months or so i've tried to pile money into savings and it shows how much we can save if we're less wasteful, so that's given us a great buffer and we can rely on my salary alone without touching it as long as we cut back on things (Definitely don't need that new Mercedes GLC we looked at last month :p)

Onto new jobs and she's looking daily, one has popped up today which is literally perfect. So she's trying not to get her hopes up too much as those types of jobs don't pop up often.
 
I was off sick from teaching for 7 months and it didn't make a difference when it came to getting a new job. Having said that, I did change careers entirely and end up working for a small, family-run bathroom fitting company, so not same levels of professionalism.
 
Well an update and it’s excellent.

She applied Thursday. Had an assessment yesterday. Had a phone interview at 10 with the practice owner. Then another at 11 with a compliance manager and then Offered the job 10 minutes ago.

Its having complete autonomy over payroll for an accountancy firm specializing in dental practices. Pretty much her perfect job.

She also had a second interview on Thursday for another job which went well and is expecting to be offered it on Monday, but it’s not as good a job.
 
Congratulations. Working for small companies run by families is often afwul. There is nothing worse than nepotism for staff morale.

I worked at a company years ago that was run by a family and most of them had worked in the business for years which was fine. Then one of the sons came out of teaching and joined the company and he was promoted and promoted until he was senior management after a year or perhaps 2. Doesn't give people any faith that they will be rewarded for hard work and that there is always a hard ceiling you will hit.
 
Martynt74 said:
Its having complete autonomy over payroll for an accountancy firm specializing in dental practices. Pretty much her perfect job.
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That's so good! This change sounds like it will be just what she needs mentally! Without having to take a lesser job that she didn't want! Great result! Well done her :D
 
Cheers guys.

She's really looking forward to it. Had a phone call yesterday and it sounds like it's a bit of a mess where various things have been ignored because "we don't like payroll", so loads of things for her to get her teeth into to sort out. She's not taking over clients till the new tax year either so that gives around 6 weeks to get things set up and processes in place and build relationships with clients prior to actually running the payroll.

Also due to the fact they currently outsource payroll who they've had loads of issues with, they've not pushed the service much to other clients. Which suggests there's a lot of opportunity to grow the customer base within payroll which should (in theory) increase her salary.

I think the only concern she has is that due to it being just her, it could be quite restrictive around annual leave and when it can be taken. Not a massive issue but something she's conscious of.



She also does some self employed bookkeeping and has just got 2 new clients which are around £150-£200 a month each. So things are definitely looking up!
 
fez said:
Congratulations. Working for small companies run by families is often afwul. There is nothing worse than nepotism for staff morale.

I worked at a company years ago that was run by a family and most of them had worked in the business for years which was fine. Then one of the sons came out of teaching and joined the company and he was promoted and promoted until he was senior management after a year or perhaps 2. Doesn't give people any faith that they will be rewarded for hard work and that there is always a hard ceiling you will hit.
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As above it's rarely a good thing.

My dad worked in a smallish sized company (maybe 100-150 staff total). It was an established business with a good 7 figure turnover. Anyway the owner had bought his brother on as an executive role. I can't remember if it was CFO or CTO etc, but this guy had practically flunked out of school with no education and was pretty much given free reign over a large responsibility of the company and he had absolutely no idea what he was doing. I recall some of the stories where this guy could barely string an email together, and resulted in either the staff doing completely the wrong thing (as they were instructed to), or having to regularly speak with him in person to clarify what was being asked.
 
Semple said:
As above it's rarely a good thing.

My dad worked in a smallish sized company (maybe 100-150 staff total). It was an established business with a good 7 figure turnover. Anyway the owner had bought his brother on as an executive role. I can't remember if it was CFO or CTO etc, but this guy had practically flunked out of school with no education and was pretty much given free reign over a large responsibility of the company and he had absolutely no idea what he was doing. I recall some of the stories where this guy could barely string an email together, and resulted in either the staff doing completely the wrong thing (as they were instructed to), or having to regularly speak with him in person to clarify what was being asked.
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That's crazy. In a company that size, you'd think there'd maybe be some upper management role you could bundle them into without it being so key!
 
Martynt74 said:
That's crazy. In a company that size, you'd think there'd maybe be some upper management role you could bundle them into without it being so key!
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Yep, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but without even knowing the company, you could almost guarantee that someone being in an executive role without having a clue what they're doing will be costing the company money. Whether that's through fines for failing to comply with regulations etc, or bad decision making that could cost sales.

As the old saying goes, it's not what you know, it's who you know.
 
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