It seems some people in the U.S. really don’t want to come in to work. Recruitment company Frank Recruitment Group analyzed Google data this year to find out how often people were looking for excuses to miss work, and the results paint an interesting picture.
People in the U.S. searched for excuses to miss work 2,230,240 times in 2022. That’s a 1,884 percent increase from the 112,400 searches of the same nature in 2020 (the lowest it had been in the last five years). The most popular one was “calling in sick,” followed by “excuse to miss work.” These phrases were often accompanied by terms like “best,” “believable” and “realistic.”
So why are people so much more desirous of missing work than they were in 2020? While we don’t have any concrete answers, the big push to return to the office by many companies at about the same time can’t be ignored. After the five-year low in 2020, the excuse searches saw a significant rebound in 2021 that only increased more this year. “It seems to coincide with the beginning of the return to office, which tells us that this hasn’t been the easiest transition for everybody,” said Rowan O'Grady, president of Americas at Frank Recruitment Group.
