There are plenty of activities that require you to leave the office for a while: Casting your vote in this year's presidential election, battling the mid-afternoon slump in a long Starbucks line, and your yearly check-up at the doctor's office. To do any one of them, you might worry you'll get in trouble at work if you take too long—and one company wants to help make at least one of those tedious tasks less risky.
Zocdoc, an online health and appointment platform, is urging employers to give workers "unsick" days—days employees could use to get preventative care such as having their teeth cleaned or visiting the gynecologist. With "unsick" days, workers wouldn't have to worry about stretching a lunch hour to go to an appointment or using sick days for times they're not actually sick, Zocdoc says.
Zocdoc, along with 10 other companies including Foursquare, Virgin Hotels, Handy, and Zola, have already given their employees an unsick day to use in 2017.
"Unsick Day will empower American workers to take care of important preventive care check-ups like annual physicals, skin screenings, and dental cleanings that are often neglected due to workplace pressures and obligations," the company says in a statement, which calls on others to offer up the day to their employees too.
Zocdoc says it conducted a survey that shows 60 percent of American workers feel uncomfortable leaving work for preventive care appointments, and 50 percent say it's their company's culture that makes them feel this way. "Unsick Day aims to change this adversarial relationship between work and health by encouraging employers to create a culture of permissiveness around preventive care," it says.
Source: http://www.glamour.com/story/unsick-days-could-be-the-next-great-job-benefit
No comments: