Clearing Medical Leaves

Office workers like to treat their medical leaves as annual leaves that needs to be cleared by end of the year. Companies usually require a medical certificate (MC) as proof. Not a problem as an MC can be easily acquired from one of your friendly neighborhood clinics.

Harmless as it may seem, clearing medical leaves do have an impact to your career. Most managers know when an employee is genuinely sick or not. There are always patterns. Always sick on Mondays or Fridays is a dead give away. 

However, most managers will not take action. It is too much of a hassle to challenge the validity of a MC. It may lead to a lengthy industrial relation court case if handled incorrectly. But you can be sure that you have been labeled and there are other consequences such as:

1. The staff won't be trusted with anything too important - never know if the person will turn up on show-and-tell day.
2. The staff will get scrutinized more often.
3. The staff will be grouped in the not groom-able/promote-able material.
4. The staff will get less sympathy in real emergencies - the manager may assume it is another case of cry wolf.
5. The staff will gain a reputation as being unreliable .

On the other hand, if you have a reputation of being a timely, reliable and responsible staff, your boss will more likely to trust you when there is a need to take a few days to tend to emergencies. He may even go the extra length to make sure you are well taken care of and help in redistributing your work.