No one likes being sick – especially when it means losing out on work. Of course, employers make allowance for sick days, since people are human. Unlike vacations, taking a sick day means not working because of forces beyond our control. At least with vacations, we’re choosing not to work and have the option to do so in emergencies. Sick days can remove that option of working.
However, sometimes being sick doesn’t have to mean we’re not working. Rather it can mean making allowances so that work can continue. This is what businesses need to consider when it comes to sickness and work.
Don’t go for the extremes
Instead of responding to sick days by writing those days off, we should consider alternatives. As one business expert Martin Brewer notes: “It is … possible to feel too ill to get into the workplace but fit enough to sit in front of a computer and work.” The problem is employees need to know what the policy is regarding this. Brewer suggests: “You may well want to introduce a formal rule or policy (perhaps it can be included in your sickness absence policy) about home working and illness.”
Of course, this is dependent on the nature of the work itself, whether the employee has internet access at home and so on. Sometimes the best thing we can do is find a compromise. This benefits the business and the employee, since work is not missed and the employee doesn’t have to worry too much about whether they have to play catch up, will receive verbal warnings and so on.
Home work
This highlights another area worth considering: health experts have warned, for several years, that long commutes are bad for health. And no less a magazine than the Harvard Business Review recommends letting employees work from home. There’s evidence to suggest increased, not less, production. If employees do work less, then these are not employees we should be hiring in the first place.
Backup plans
Sometimes work must be rescheduled and meetings shifted. This means we must always have a backup plan to cater for sick employees or other emergencies. Indeed, we should rather consider staff sickness as we would any other unforeseen hindrance to productivity. However, unlike loss of electricity or robbery, staff sickness can be managed in terms of compromises.
Reach out to staff
We should also create environments where staff don’t feel obligated to work through sickness. We don’t want them producing work while in a drug-fuelled or pain-riddled haze. As a business, we should always be reaching out enquiring about their current and future state – everything from their daily health to their plans for retirement annuity, savings and the like. We need not be invasive but we have every right to ask since this concerns the business’ ability to operate.