It’s Enough to Make You Sick

                            Too many people come to work when they should be home in bed.

 

 

ew people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better.

With cold and flu season in full swing, you might be surrounded by coughing, sniffly co-workers. Every year around this time my inbox at Ask a Manager fills up with complaints about colleagues who shouldn’t be at work, putting everyone else at risk of getting sick, too. 

Sometimes, of course, it’s due to a martyr complex—the feeling that work cannot possibly go on without them, or a notion that they’ll get points for dragging themselves into work while sick. 

But frequently, employers’ own policies are why sick people are at their desks instead of at home in bed. Too often, employers don’t give any paid sick leave, or they only offer 3–5 days a year (not enough for many)—and then they’re surprised when an illness runs through the whole office, as this person writes: 

I’m the head of a team of 15–20 part-time employees who are paid hourly and do not get benefits or paid leave. It’s flu season, and some of them have been coming to work clearly sick—some to the point that they look like they can barely stay awake. Is there any reason I would not be able to instate a “if you’re sick, you can’t come in” rule to keep the germs from spreading around? I understand these guys want their pay, but when someone brings a disease into the office it spreads like wildfire, and the overall effect is detrimental to both productivity and morale.

Here’s what that kind of policy looks like from the employee side:

When I was younger and had a small child, I worked at a company with no sick time, very stingy vacation time, and penalty points for calling in sick, missing any work at all, or being more than three minutes late …

One day off work meant a 20 percent pay cut that week, and with already low wages, and more bills than paycheck, I simply couldn’t afford it. I worked with the flu, fevers, strep throat, etc. I’d go home and collapse, do the bare minimum at home, and get up the next day and just pray for the weekend. It was bad enough that I had no paid sick days, and I couldn’t use vacation days because they were mandated to be used in July and December during company shutdowns, but on top of that, I got dinged attendance points for being sick. 12 attendance points in a rolling calendar year meant termination.

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