“Sick” is the only answer with no consequence attached
A crew member calls at six in the morning to say they are sick. That word goes into the system, and at the end of the quarter you have a report telling you illness is your biggest attendance problem.
Sometimes illness is the biggest problem. Often it is not.
Consider who is on the other end of that call. The manager taking it is the person who writes next week’s schedule, decides who gets the hours, and decides who gets considered for the next step up. A worker who admits to that person that they could not afford gas until payday is taking a real risk. Saying they are sick carries no risk and ends the conversation.
Nobody in this scenario is behaving badly. The worker is protecting themselves against a real consequence, and the manager is recording what they were told. Researchers have measured what decides whether anybody speaks up at all.
Whether people speak up comes down to one belief, and 51 teams established it
Amy Edmondson at Harvard studied 51 work teams to find out what makes people report problems rather than absorb them silently. Her finding was published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 1999, and researchers call the condition psychological safety.
The single variable is whether speaking up will count against you.
Where that belief is absent, teams do not report fewer problems because they have fewer problems. Reporting drops because reporting is unsafe.
Attendance is the version of that finding which costs an operator money every week. Your data is a record of what people were willing to tell you rather than of what happened. So the gap between the two lists is worth measuring.
Transportation is 81% of what workers ask for, childcare is 3%
We see the gap directly, because workers come to us rather than to their employer.
| What employers name as the barrier | What workers actually ask us for |
|---|---|
| Childcare, named first by most operators we speak to | Transportation, 81% of all requests |
| Transportation, usually named second | Food, 16% of all requests |
| Money worries, rarely named at all | Childcare, 3% of all requests |
Childcare is real, and for the households it affects it is severe. A national survey of US parents found that childcare problems produced absence from work for 21% and a change to the work schedule for 27%, with single-parent households significantly more affected. What the volume numbers show is that childcare is not the frequency problem employers believe it to be, and transportation is.
An operator working from the assumed list builds the wrong thing. Backup childcare partnerships get negotiated while the actual problem is a bus route that does not start early enough for an opening shift. Our own request data is one company’s, so the independent literature matters here.
Transport costs 2 to 4 points of employment for workers without a degree
Our 81% is one company’s request data. The independent literature tells the same story from the other side, which matters if you are deciding whether to trust a vendor’s number.
- A review of 140 welfare-reform studies found transportation named repeatedly as a barrier to employment, a reason for staying on assistance and a reason for leaving a job.
- Access to a car is strongly associated with employment, job retention and rising earnings. Transit access alone shows a much weaker relationship.
- Commuting costs explain roughly 2 to 4 percentage points of the unemployment rate for people with at most a high school qualification.
- The median worker earning under twice the federal poverty line spends 6.1% of income on commuting. Above that threshold the figure is 3.8%.
Read the last two together. Getting to work costs a low-wage worker nearly twice the share of income it costs everybody else, and the cost is large enough to show up in national employment figures. Absence is only the visible half of what that pressure does.
Money worry degrades the work of people who do turn up
Absence is the visible half. The other half is what financial strain does to somebody who came in.
Kaur, Mullainathan, Oh and Schilbach published a field experiment in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025. The design staggered when wages were paid, so some workers received cash earlier while others stayed liquidity constrained. After the cash arrived, workers cleared debts and bought household essentials, and then:
- Output rose 7%.
- They made fewer costly, unintentional mistakes, so they worked faster and more attentively at the same time.
- The effects concentrated among the most financially constrained workers.
The authors rule out gift exchange and better nutrition as explanations and point to a cognitive channel. Money worry occupies attention that the job needs.
State the limitation plainly. The sample is Indian piece-rate manufacturing workers, so treat the direction as the finding rather than the size. Money pressure also shapes the word a worker uses when they call in.
Paid sick leave changes what saying “sick” costs the worker
If “sick” is the answer you get, it is worth knowing what that word costs the person saying it.
The evidence on paid sick leave mandates is genuinely mixed and deserves to be presented that way. Some work finds mandates reduce turnover, raise labor supply and raise household income, with around a 1.5% rise in employment after enactment and higher operating profit for exposed firms. Other difference-in-difference work finds no substantive effect on hires, separations or turnover.
What stays consistent across the studies: mandates raise coverage, raise absences among those who newly gain cover, with larger effects for women and households with children, and they reduce presenteeism.
For an operator the practical reading is about your data rather than about policy. Where sick pay is absent, a call-out costs the worker a day’s wages whatever the reason, so the recorded reason tells you even less than usual. Which leaves the question of how to get a truer one.
Five ways to get the real reasons, none of which need software
- Ask about the last time, not the general case. “What happened the last time getting here was difficult?” produces a real answer. “What stops you getting to work?” produces a polite nothing. The general question invites a general answer, and people default to the safest one available.
- Have the conversation with somebody closer to their own level. People say more to a peer than to whoever decides their hours. A crew trainer or a long-serving colleague will hear things a manager never will, and the information is just as useful when it arrives second-hand and unattributed.
- Read what people do, not what they say. Which shifts get called out on, and at what times. If your call-outs cluster on early openings and on the last few days before payday, you are looking at transportation and money, whatever the reason field says.
- Ask leavers four weeks after they go, not on their last day. On the last day people still want a good reference, so you get the safe answer again. A month later they have a new job and no reason to withhold anything. A short message asking one honest question gets a high response rate.
- Give people a route that does not go through their employer. This is the mechanism behind our own program, so treat it as a disclosed interest. Workers tell an independent party things they will not tell the business that pays them, and the employer gets the pattern back without the names attached. Any arrangement with that property will work, and it does not have to be us.
Better data changes three decisions
Getting better data is only worth the effort if it changes something.
Where you spend. The assumed list and the real list point at different budgets. Check yours against what your crew actually report before the next renewal.
Which shifts you scrutinize. Attendance problems concentrate in specific shifts, usually the earliest and the latest, for reasons connected to transport rather than to motivation.
How your managers respond. A manager who believes call-outs are a discipline problem responds one way. A manager who knows most of them are a logistics problem responds differently, and the research on how that response affects retention is unambiguous.
The gap is large enough to invert the ranking
Most operators already sense their attendance data is soft. What tends to be missing is the size of the gap and the reason for it.
In our own programs the largest category by volume is the one employers rank second or third, and the category employers rank first is the smallest of the three. The gap is not noise around the edges of a broadly correct picture.
Your reason field is a measure of what your crew feel safe saying. Improving what goes into it is cheaper than any of the programs you might build on top of it.
FAQ
- Is it not simpler to make the reason field mandatory? Forcing an answer changes what gets typed rather than what is true. A required field with a dropdown produces more “sick,” because the safest option is still the safest option.
- How do I ask without it feeling like an interrogation? Ask about the barrier, not the absence. “What would make getting here easier?” is a question about the route to work. “Why were you off?” is a question about the person.
- Should I tell my crew I am collecting this? Yes, and tell them what it is for. People answer differently when they know the purpose is changing the schedule or the support rather than building a case.
- What if the real reasons turn out to be things I cannot fix? Some will be. Knowing that transport drives four in five of your problems still tells you where not to spend, which is worth the exercise on its own.
- How often should I redo this? Once a year, and after any change to your locations, your shift times or your local transport. The mix is specific to a place, and it changes when the place does.
References
- Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999, 44(2).
- Kaur, Mullainathan, Oh and Schilbach, “Do Financial Concerns Make Workers Less Productive?,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2025, 140(1).
- Urban Institute, Access to Opportunity through Equitable Transportation.
- Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, district digest on commuting costs.
- National survey of US parents on childcare problems and employment.
- Paid sick leave evidence, Journal of Human Resources.
- Escalate program data. Support request mix across active programs: transportation 81%, food 16%, childcare 3%.
