After the pandemic, almost 20 times more people Google excuses to skip work

The data is unforgivable – in comparison to the beginning of 2020 when the number of searches for “excuses to miss work” lingered at about 113 thousand, two years later, the number had skyrocketed to 2.2 million. Seems like “calling in sick” and “excuses to miss work” will rank among the top searches for 2022. 

These results come as silent, yet confident indicators of employees unwillingness to return to the office. As people are becoming more used to working from home and employers are becoming more insistent on requiring people to return back to their offices, employees are having a hard time returning to a nine-to-five office mode. 

According to the authors of the research, the Frank Recruitment Group, “calling in sick” was the most-searched term in 2022 of the 10 most popular searches over the past five years, followed by “excuse to miss work.”

The company used keywordtool.io to aggregate and group the data. It was done on a monthly basis, between 2018 and 2022 using SEMrush, and the analysis used monthly, yearly, and cumulative numbers. 

But maybe all of these people were actually feeling sick and were looking for the best way to break it to their bosses? You wish. The research also showed that the overwhelming majority of the top 10 popular search terms include the term “excuses to/for missing work,” but are led by words like “best,” “realistic,” and “believable.”