Much publicity about so-called National Sickie Day yesterday
In the 1970s I worked under a Director who paid close attention to the sick leave returns each month. He said that if they started to go up, it was a clear sign of falling morale & it was time to have the section head in for a chat to find out where they (almost invariably a he in those days) were going wrong, why they were failing to inspire their staff.
All these estimates of the cost to the economy of sick leave, made by people with an axe to grind irritate me intensely.
Clearly there are some tasks which can be performed only while actually present in a designated place of work; if you are absent either someone covers for you or the work just does not get done .
But work can take place while people are somewhere else - on top of the bus, in the bath or even fast asleep in bed.
In the days when we had to write our own computer code I sometimes woke in the middle of the night to find DO WHILE … FOR N=1 TO ….GOSUB running through my brain. Who knows if it made any sense or not, I never roused myself to write it down. After all, I did not expect to get paid for it.
I did have the outline of one of my most fruitful ideas while lying in the bath one evening; on that occasion I did rush to put pen to paper lest I forgot, not just the details but the whole idea. I did not expect to get paid for that time either - Eureka was satisfaction & reward enough.
When you have to manage staff yourself it is hard to find the right balance to strike, especially when the nature of the work is such that it is not often essential for everybody to be there together, or available to deal with third parties, customers, patients etc.
Work - output - is not something than can be divided up & fitted into discrete moments of time which, once past, is gone for ever.
Some of the best & most productive members of your group may be hopeless time keepers, or prone to prefer to stay at home some days rather than face the journey to work or the constant interruptions of the office.
And the most meticulous time keepers, sticklers for arriving on the dot, are the most likely to insist on their right to leave at the contracted hour rather than see the current mini crisis through to a satisfactory conclusion.
So what is fair? Insistence that everybody adopts a rigid schedule of presenteeism, or judgement by the results & quality of the work they produce.
We often hear that some very large proportion of the population dislikes their job. I suspect that it is not what they have to do, but where (& when) they have to be that irks.
