When the Algorithm Thinks You're Pulling a Sickie

There’s a thread doing the rounds that I’ve been mulling over for a few days now, and it touches on something that genuinely gets under my skin — the intersection of bad management, AI-generated nonsense, and the quiet erosion of worker trust.

Someone posted about receiving a fairly formal email from their manager flagging “patterns” in their sick leave. On the surface, sounds reasonable enough. Twenty-six days in twelve months is above the standard ten-day FTE entitlement, the manager wants medical certificates going forward — fine, that’s within their rights. But then you read the details and the whole thing starts to unravel a bit.

The manager pointed to sick leave being taken mostly Monday to Thursday, with “limited instances on Fridays,” framing this as evidence of suspicious clustering. Here’s the kicker: the person doesn’t work Fridays. Their roster is Monday to Thursday. Of course there are no Friday sick days. That’s not a pattern — that’s just how a roster works.

Now, several people in the thread raised the same eyebrow I did: this email reads like someone fed a spreadsheet into an AI tool, got back a tidy-sounding “pattern analysis,” and forwarded it without actually thinking about what they were reading. The language is very… generated. “Multiple instances of consecutive sick leave taken across weekdays.” “Clustered absences.” It’s the kind of output you get when you ask an LLM to sound authoritative without giving it the full picture.

This is something I think about a lot in my day job. AI tools are genuinely useful — I use them regularly, and they’ve changed how I work. But there’s a creeping trend of people treating AI output as conclusions rather than starting points. You still have to read the bloody thing critically. You still have to apply context. A spreadsheet doesn’t know that someone’s on a Monday-to-Thursday roster. It just sees no Friday entries and flags an anomaly.

The broader issue here is one of trust and dignity in the workplace. This person had a rough year health-wise — they’ve noted it was unusually bad — and they still have 180 hours of sick leave banked. That’s not the profile of someone systematically rorting the system. That’s someone who built up leave over years and had a difficult twelve months. Any decent manager who looked at the full picture would see that immediately.

What strikes me most is the comment from someone who identified as an HR manager in the thread. They acknowledged the manager “sounds like a total idiot” but also said 26 days is something HR would be interested in. That’s fair. But another person pushed back well — context matters enormously. If someone has 180 hours in the bank, that’s tenure. That’s evidence of someone who doesn’t normally do this.

Fair Work in Australia does give employers reasonable grounds to request medical certificates, including for single-day absences in some circumstances. That’s the law, and it’s not inherently unreasonable. What is unreasonable is constructing a narrative of suspicion based on flawed data analysis and then presenting it as fact to an employee without checking whether the “pattern” makes any sense at all.

The best advice in the whole thread was refreshingly pragmatic: respond professionally, politely correct the record on the roster situation, confirm you’ll provide certificates, and don’t go in swinging. It’s not about being a pushover — it’s about being strategic. Getting into a formal escalation when you’re already on someone’s radar tends to amplify the scrutiny, not reduce it. And as one commenter put it bluntly, HR exists to protect the company, not the employee. Worth keeping that in mind before you fire off an email to HR assuming they’ll be sympathetic referees.

The person should absolutely document everything, keep a copy of that email, and correct the factual errors — particularly the Friday omission — in writing. Not aggressively, just clearly. Put the correct context on the record without making it a confrontation.

What I’d love to see more broadly — and I know I’m being idealistic here — is workplaces that approach high sick leave with genuine curiosity rather than suspicion. Is something going on with this person’s health? Is the work environment itself contributing? In this case the person works front-line with the public, so of course illnesses spread. Is there a wellbeing conversation to be had? That would be the mark of a good manager. An AI-generated pattern report forwarded without critical thought is very much not that.

We’ve got Fair Work protections in this country that many workers in other parts of the world would envy. But those protections only matter if people know their rights and feel safe using them. Nobody should feel like taking legitimate sick leave — leave they’ve earned — puts a target on their back.