About 16.1 million U.S. employees may miss work the Monday after Super Bowl LV, according to the annual Super Bowl absenteeism survey commissioned by The Workforce Institute at UKG and conducted online by The Harris Poll among more than 1,000 employed U.S. adults.
Of that number, about 8.8 million employees will take a pre-approved personal day/PTO this year.
That survey found more than two-thirds of U.S. employees (69%) say they would feel guilty pretending to be sick to get out of work on the day after the Super Bowl this year when so many people are actually sick.
Still, about 4.4 million employees admit they’re planning to call in sick to work even though they aren’t actually sick.
Here are some of the other findings of the study:
- The trend of “ghosting”—where employees don’t show up for work and don’t tell anyone they won’t be working—continues to grow: An estimated 2.9 million employees say they’ll “ghost” work this year, nearly doubling last year’s number of 1.5 million workers.
- While an estimated 10.2 million employees say they plan to start work later than normal on Super Monday this year, another estimated 10.2 million will wait until the last minute—either Sunday night or Monday morning—to decide. This means the total number of absences could be even higher than anticipated.
- A third of employees (33%) who work remotely at least some of the time say they’ll slack off the day after the Super Bowl because their employer won’t know.
- More than half of employees (53%) also admit they would be afraid to call out sick the day after the Super Bowl this year because their employer may require a doctor’s note or negative COVID-19 test before allowing them to return to work.
- Overall, about half of employees (51%) say their employer is proactively planning for the absenteeism that can happen on the Monday after the Super Bowl, down slightly from 56% last year.
Nearly two-thirds of employees agree that an easy fix for this problem is moving the Super Bowl to the Sunday before Presidents Day so the day after the game would be a national holiday.
