I work from him too, but had a stomach bug or food poisoning last week that was bad enough for me to tell the team that I would be completely unavailable. I took a sick day for that, and I didn’t even peek at email. Normally, with a cold or something, I’ll just work through it, or at least monitor and respond to email.
With work-from-home, I often take half a day off when I’m sick. I will work some in the morning, take a nap in the afternoon, and do a little more work after the nap. It’s often a good compromise between keeping projects moving and not being up to working at full strength.
Yes, that’s why I think it’s important to discuss the type of job when answering this sort of question. There are some jobs where being away unexpectedly will leave people in the lurch, and others where it’s easy enough for co-workers to cover for you, and others where it’s just not a big deal at all. Those are very different situations.
So this point applies to the 5% or so of Americans who make 200k a year (and the vanishingly small percentage of them who make that straight out of school). What about the vast majority of people who don’t make nearly that much?
I had an advantage when it came to taking time off, a union job at a big company. Most management considered our time off benefits to use as we wish. The last 15 years I worked, I was earning the maximum benefits when it came to vacation. It wasn’t unusual to earn 300 or more hours a year. When I retired, I was paid for 930 hours of vacation and 120 hours of sick leave that I had accumulated. I usually took 2 or 3 days off a month in addition to 3 or so weeks of vacation a year.
I mostly can’t accept that argument. I’ve seen similar comments about multi-millionaire ballplayers missing a game to attend the birth of a child. But IMHO it a moral imperative that overrides any and all employment clauses unless life and death is on the line. I’d certainly make exceptions but generally no mere job, no matter how well remunerated, should take precedence over very important personal events. An employer that demands otherwise is an employer that should be held in contempt by society writ large.
No, the point was in relation to msmith’s assertion that a company that thinks you’re critical to operations should pay you more/treat you better. That assumes a workplace loyalty/priority point where you can unfailingly count on them, and there isn’t. No matter how well treated or compensated people are, one day they’ll think “nah, I’d rather…” They’ll decide that the job is replaceable.
But when the company takes that view about them…
If you have any kind of “loyalty” to your employer you’re a damn fool. If you think your employer has any kind of “loyalty” to you beyond the net benefit that employing you provides them, again, you’re a damn fool.
I’ve almost never had a job where my unexpected absence didn’t mean that someone else had to pick up the slack. If I wasn’t there, then either they had to try to get someone to come in on their day off, or everyone just had to work harder to make up for it.
So, I only called off when I was pretty much entirely incapable of making it in. I’ve called off less than a dozen times in my nearly 30 years of employment.
I also never skipped school, even though I really hated school far more than I’ve dislike any job.
Where I’ve worked that had an attendance policy, when an employee would get to the end of their points and be facing termination, when they would call off, they would say, “But this time I’m actually sick.” These are the same people who, when given a 6 minute grace period for clocking in, would complain about being written up for clocking in 7 minutes late, claiming that they were only one minute late.
Now, if I call off, the doors don’t even open. No clients can get served, and the employees don’t get paid.
When one of my employees calls off, it means that other employees have to work harder, and/or stay later in order to make up the work. If enough employees call off, I have to start calling clients and cancelling appointments.
That said, I have yet to have found an attendance policy that ends up with me continuing to have employees. They like to call off at the slightest whim. I just consider reliability to be a metric I evaluate them under for evaluations, and fire the ones whose unreliability makes my business untenable, even if that means that I end up paying them unemployment.
Of course, trying to get clients to show up for the appointments that they make is a whole nother challenge.
You may be the only one who is in the office that is trained to do that job. But that doesn’t mean that you are the only one who can. It’s a choice as to whether it’s worth it to the employer to humor you or to find someone else.
So, it goes more like:
You: I’d like to take next week off.
Boss: You can’t, we already have things scheduled for next week that we need you here for.
You: Well, since I’m so critical, then I take that week or I quit.
Boss: Since you won’t be here when we need you here, then I suppose we no longer need your services. We will hire and train someone to replace you who will hopefully have their act together better.
No one is irreplaceable, and no one is more replaceable than someone who replaces themselves.
You know, some employers actually do care about their employees.
But, after a while the attitude that you insist that they have makes it harder and harder to do so.
If your employer is a human being, sure, they might care about you. I believe my boss honestly cares about me. But most people are employed by corporations, and corporations don’t have feelings. And it’s not my boss who will decide if we get re-org’ed and half the jobs in my area go away.
I’m sure they do. For example, I have a great personal relationship with my supervisor, as well as most of my subordinates.
But my company doesn’t make business decisions based on the personal relationships we who work at the company have with one another, and I’d have to be pretty stupid to ignore that and act like they do.
Right, but it was not said, “Large corporations don’t care about you.” it was said that your employer doesn’t care about you.
And by most, you mean the smallest of majorities.
Small Economic Activity | JPMorgan Chase Institute.
48% of people do work for small businesses. That’s down from a majority of 52% only a decade or so ago.
I’d say there’s a correlation between this trend of employees no longer having any respect for their employer, and small businesses shrinking as a portion of the job market.
People complain about faceless corporations, and then do everything in their power to try to make sure that anything that’s not a faceless corporation fails.
And employees don’t make their decisions based on personal relationships either. If I didn’t pay them, I wouldn’t expect them to show up for work just for the fun of it.
And yet, they seem to expect me to pay them even if they don’t show up for work.
There’s some crap employers out there, I know, I’ve worked for more than a few. But, the question is, how many started out that way, and how many ended up that way after being burned by treating their employees with a respect that is not returned?
I know that I’ve become a bit less considerate of employees after having them take advantage of me. I started with the naive idea that if I treated them respectfully and paid them equitably, they would return that respect and be willing to put in the effort that is needed for all of us to succeed. I’ve become less naive on this front, and no longer give them nearly the benefit of the doubt I used to.
To be fair, many of the worst employers I’ve heard of have been small businesses. Small businesses are, ime, more likely to disregard harassmen, sexual or otherwise, more likely to engage in wage theft, more likely to violate safety procedures, more likely to do something like fire you for getting pregnant. Having a legal department to clarify things for management is a big difference.
I have worked for large corporations that were literally run by people who ended up in prison, but even they treated me better than many of the hallowed small business I am familiar with. You want wage theft, unsafe work environments, sexual harassment, racial discrimination, tax evasion, ADA non-compliance, small business is where you’ll find it more easily than any large corporation.
ETA, ninjaed by MandaJo
Yep.
Although I have had some good experiences with some of the small businesses I’ve worked with, the places I experienced wage theft and a co-worker attempting to physically assault me with nothing done about it were both small businesses.
There are pros and cons to working to both small businesses and big businesses, I’ve worked at both. Right now, I’m OK with staying with a large corporation.
I think it depends.
If you work for a larger company with plenty of staff to cover then maybe.
If you work for a small company they are bound to be less flexible with cover. Providing everyone generally works hard and helps each other out at your job then I think it’s a bit shitty to just ring in because you don’t feel like working that day. It’s not the employer who loses it out its inevitably your co-workers who have a harder day because you couldn’t be arsed getting out of bed.
It really depends on your circumstances as to whether it’s OK.
Right, obviously. Everyone’s got to make a living somehow.
Did you agree to give them PTO when you hired them? If so they are well within their rights to take what is a condition of their employment. PTO policy is certainly something to consider when choosing to work at company A vs company B.
There’s some crap employees out there, I know, I’ve had more than a few under me. But, the question is, how many started out that way, and how many ended up that way after being burned by treating their employers with a respect that is not returned?
When I started at my current company, I was naive. I thought if I worked hard every day and didn’t rock the boat too much, I’d be rewarded with added responsibilities and accordingly higher pay. Despite working my ass off, what I actually got was an annual raise that didn’t even keep up with inflation. On the other hand, getting other offers and telling my employer that they could beat these other offers or I can walk worked spectacularly.
I wish I didn’t have that sort of relationship with the company. I wish that I could simply be rewarded fairly for doing my job well. But unfortunately the only way to get ahead in the corporate world is to play these games.
As another example, the entry level position I originally started at requires a college degree, a firm grasp of GAAP, and some pretty advanced problem solving skills. When I graduated from college and looked for employment, I found this position appealing because it offered a fair salary and promised room for growth.
Since then, some major changes to the company meant that the entry level position is no longer salaried - it is now hourly. The effective salary it pays today is a hair LOWER than it paid when I started. Further, I was one of the last people in my department promoted from within. Around the same time they changed from salary to hourly (thankfully after I was already promoted out of that position) they also started hiring from outside the company to fill higher level positions.
Meanwhile additional responsibilities have been added to that entry level position, year after year.
Taken together, these changes have meant that many of the entry level employees have quit, and the company is having a hell of a time finding applicants to fill that role. Again and again, my boss and boss’ boss have complained that people would rather stay home and collect unemployment. Again and again, I have pointed out to them that people qualified for our entry level position are also qualified for plenty of other roles that treat them like actual professionals and offer room for growth, but this feedback has fallen on deaf ears. I’d certainly never have applied for the position if I were graduating today.
Frankly, I can’t really blame any of the people who work under me for giving the company the bare, bare minimum. If I were in their position, I’d do the same, or I’d have left long ago.
I voted no. Any time I missed time from work (which was rare) it puts staffing pressure on others. For 47 of the 50 years I was in the workforce I was entitled to sick pay so I went out of my way not to abuse it.