Over the years, it seems like coworkers with large extended families have been pains in the butt to work with. There’s always a relative getting sick, dying, getting married, or having a baby, all requiring time off from work.
Ugh, this puts everyone in an awful situation. I’m not heartless and neither are the majority of managers I’ve worked under. But, all the constant unexpected emergencies can be very annoying.
I’m not a people manager, thank God. But, I"m curious as to how managers handle employees like these. At my current company, although there are various rules, they tend to be extremely lenient and don’t require documentation. In fact, if you’re ever asked for documentation, you’re already on the shit list and one step closer to being fired.
Any organization should have as its base assumption that its people will occasionally have personal matters to take care of. If this is a “pain in the butt,” it’s because the construction of the organization was deficient in the first place.
This is part of the reason that companies age and gender discriminate. Younger male employees tend to work more hours for the same salary, are more willing to stay at work even when family emergencies crop up, and of course cost less in health insurance premiums. It’s only a statistical tendency - obviously there are exceptions - but it is perfectly rational for employers to prefer employees they perceive have more value per dollar of salary.
So your employer lets people take time off for family weddings in addition to vacation or personal or sick days? Send me a job application. Otherwise if they’re blowing through their personal days off for their nieces apendectomy or grandmas C-section, what is it to you?
No, the worst is coworkers who are getting married. Mostly women, but even the men can get infected. Once they get that ring, fahgedda bout it. From now on it’s daily reports on how the venue is coming, the caterer, bridesmaids being weird, got to leave early to go check out a cake tasting. Got to leave early to meet up with the personal trainer so you can fit in the wedding dress.
Once I worked in an office where there were TWO people planning weddings. I mean. Think any work’s gonna get done? Think you’re gonna hear about every little thing? About what nonsense the future MIL is up to and all that? Yeah. All drama all the time.
With any luck it only happens once though, right? Once per employee. Hire old women, they’re beyond this nonsense.
At my workplace, everyone gets a bank of leave they can use for “family/personal” reasons. When you exhaust your yearly allotment of FPL, then you have to dip into your annual leave, which accrues with each pay period and rolls over each year (up to a certain amount).
So while a person with a lot of family obligations may have to take off more time than someone else, it’s not like they get special treatment.
And while I can see how such an employee would be “non-ideal”, I can also appreciate that at any moment, anyone can become “non-ideal”. Several years ago I was a “non-ideal” employee because I was going through health issues and I had a slew of doctor’s appointments to keep. I was very grateful that I could take off about whenever I had to, with no one giving me a hard time about it. I try to remember how fortunate I was whenever I am tempted to sneer at other coworkers.
Where I work, people on salary have a certain number of days they can take off, and other than sick days, have to get them approved ahead of time. If you want to go to your niece’s wedding, that might mean that later, own kid has a thing at school, you might be out of days.
Hourly people don’t get paid, and have to check that me, the floater, isn’t already assigned that day. If I am, then they have to go looking for a sub on the “occasionals” list. Those people tend not to be available unless you ask WAY in advance. If someone is using me so often that I’m not available for people who call in sick of have emergencies, they are liable to get called in for a talking to. There is one person who has a lot of doctor’s appointments, but she goes, and comes back, and tries to make her appointments first thing in the morning. Emergencies tend to call people away for the latter part of the day.
I agree that if a single person being gone creates a real problem, then something is not right in the workplace. Most places are structured so that absences don’t screw things up. People are absent. It happens.
FWIW, it’s really not fair that there’s a double standard. A man who stays at work through family emergencies-- when a kid is in the hospital, or whatever, is a “team player.” A woman who does the same is “heartless.”
No, they’re not. The worst are mothers of kids who are in big dance recitals, or parents who have a child on a traveling sports team, and went into this completely unaware, or in denial, that something like this completely takes over every aspect of a family’s life - in some cases more so than chronic illness, although unlike most chronic illnesses, there IS an end in sight for these things.
The absolute worst are people who come to work when they’re sick, even if they don’t “have” to and have accumulated leave, because they think the place will fall down without them, when in fact they’re in the kind of job where, if they died suddenly, we’d go to their funeral and come back and post their job opening. :o
I know one data point doesn’t mean much, but the worst abuser of time off from my working days was a single, childless man. I guess I’ve been lucky because, despite working for the government for 26 years, my coworkers were mostly very professional, reliable, and conscientious, regardless of their family situation. We earned set amounts of sick leave and annual leave, and in extreme situations, we might be able to get some advanced to us, but I don’t recall any cases of people taking more than they earned, apart from personal medical emergencies.
Seems to me, when it comes to work ethic, you either have it or you don’t.
When I started at AT&T, they had a perfect attendance award for those not sick the entire year. You got a lunch and a small gift certificate. Then they finally figured out this was rewarding people who came in sick, and stopped it.
Hey, I was a mother of kids in a big dance recital, and my coworkers never even knew! I guess they did hear about my wedding, but not for long, because once I decided to do it, I decided to get it over with fast. (And simply.)
I never had a problem with co-workers who had to be off due to family emergencies. Where my resentment came in is where those with children, especially women with children, felt that this status gave them some advantage over a single male (like me) when it came to feeling entitled to the plum days off, like the day or two before Christmas. I usually didn’t care or mind working those days (in my business it was dead slow and it was sort of like a day off anyway) but I resented the assumption that their lives and their time off was more valuable than mine due to the existence of progeny (pro tip: “progeny” is not the word I used in my head at such times).
When I became a manager I made sure those days off were always selected by lottery for my team. I could feel eyes of resentment burning into the back of my head, especially when I won the lottery and the parents of children did not. I did not mind that feeling, and I made sure that all understood that calling in sick on those days was a black mark even if I couldn’t take disciplinary action about it.
Large families and dependant families are two very-different things.
The mother and 9th brother of one of the largest families I know have dementia; they live together, and the other 9 siblings and their spouses have organized themselves to make sure they’re cared for. Three of the things the division of labor has taken into account are: who do the two patients respond best to, and when (for example, Luismi won’t accept his brother telling him to eat, but prefers his help to that of their sisters when going to the doctor); who lives closest (two sisters live within three blocks); and who has more flexibility with their work hours. In turn the siblings who are less involved in direct care are taking care of the caretakers; for example, another sister is handling grocery shopping for the household of the patients and of two of the main caretakers.
One of my coworkers was a single child and unmarried. Guess who took care of her mother.
A good manager makes sure everyone gets their turn. Unfortunately, good managers are a minority.
If Mary Sue was constantly taking off because one of her cousins or in-laws was getting married or having a baby or they had to do something for their mother, then a smart or even ruthless boss would eventually call them out for it, especially if it always conveniently happened on a holiday or important deadline. Company wise, a company won’t like you taking your vacation days, or your PTO* all on short notice, or always during peak hours or near holidays.
But yes, I have seen that sort of thing. The employee who always needs time off for a grandma, in-laws and cousins. I don’t know that you could convince me that at least some of that was just bad excuses and they were enjoying a random day off. Or they had a doctor or other professional appointment they didn’t feel like telling you about.
Hell, back in my pre-burnout programming days, at most jobs I took one day off each month, usually on good weather, but never when I had stuff to work on, meetings or deadlines. But then, most places and jobs I worked during my career in programming (1981-2001), I was the sole programmer and support for what I did, so I rarely took a solid week off, and mostly took 4-5 day weekends for short trips, if I had any time off remaining after the mental health days and actual sick days. I only had to directly explain it to one manager, who was ‘calling me out’ on misusing my PTO. I explained what I did, and asked her if she would like me to stop doing it, and schedule a 2 week vacation the next year. She decided my plan worked for her after-all.
Usually a pool of combined vacation/sick days that doesn’t punish people who get sick a lot, they can use the days for any purpose.
See, I don’t understand this. If those days didn’t matter to you and they did matter to someone else, why not let someone have them who they mattered to? It’s not that they think they have an advantage, or even that they think their time is more valuable.
(But then, I once quit a job because I had use-it-or-lose-it days, four of them, that I had to use by Dec. 31, and even one day off in goddamn winter is useless to me. I did use them. Then I quit because due to my start date, that situation would come up every year, i.e., I would not have the days saved up in beautiful summer, and then I would have to waste them by taking them off again in deadly winter.)
I guess it really depends on when you think the plum days off are. I will work on Christmas Day, no problem. It is not a plum day for me, being as it’s too few hours of too dim sunlight. It doesn’t really sound like it was a plum day for you either, but ha ha, someone who wanted it didn’t get it.
IME, yes. They want to come in late, leave early, and tell you in excruciating detail all the crap their kids achieved in the last week/month/whatever, instead of focusing on the work in front of them.
And then, they’re on the phone as often as not, talking to someone about something family-related. I saw one guy actually tell a customer (to their face) to “Hold on a sec,” while he took a personal call on his company cell.
Yeah, the places I’ve worked, the procedure for deciding who gets popular days off started with ‘OK, who doesn’t mind working those days?’, and only if everyone, or almost everyone, said they really wanted them off did any lottery system kick in. Or the manager’s just signed themselves up for it to save argument.
