A is for Ailments

[the_siobhan]

I am totally stealing this trope from the_other_j.

One of the ways in which I think my workplace maybe hasn't fully thought things through is their policy towards sickness and attendance. Attendance and punctuality in the call centre are what they call "performance measures". And I totally get the driver for this, you can't call customers if you don't have bums in seats. Where it kind of breaks down is where this policy interacts with the meat-based life forms that occasionally get colonized by various viruses, bacteria and parasites.

Because one of the other policies that they have is an employee's personal medical information is private and none of the managers' business. Also completely legitimate. But it leaves a sick employee in a kind of a weird limbo - we can't provide any confirmation that we are in fact ill and not just malingering, but we'll also get dinged on our performance ratings for taking the time off to get better.

So the end result is fairly predictable. Everybody comes to work sick. And in a densely populated room where people sit close together and breathe recirculated air, the result of that decision is likewise entirely predictable. There isn't one bug that hits anybody who works here that isn't shared widely and shared often. I can watch my co-workers get leveled one by one whenever a particularly virulent flu or cold hits town. This most recent one has resulted in epic levels of absenteeism.

Last year when I was really sick I took time off until I got better, or at least less infectious. And I got rated poorly for it. This year I've been dragging myself into work with everything from contagious dandruff to projectile leprosy. And when people ask me why I don't keep my sick ass at home, I tell them the truth - protecting their health directly penalizes me. But if I make everybody else sick my numbers end up looking pretty good.

I'm kind of hoping that this current bug works it's way through the management chain to the people who in charge of the attendance policy. But even if it does I know my victory will be entirely Pyrrhic. They're allowed to take time off.

Comments

[girfan.livejournal.com]

She is asthmatic as well, which is where the problem lies. Though, she said former co-workers who were very physically fit (used a gym, ran marathons, etc.) had not been able to do their normal amounts of exercise due to all the low-grade infections going around the building all winter.