This is awesome.
The former head of HR at my company once held a meeting with the managers where she notified them that 50% of the employees were above average in terms of sick time taken! :eek:
Hold a meeting. Announce that 50% of the employees are performing below average. Insist that the average will be brought up by firing the lowest 10%.
Next year: Complain that once again, 50% are performing below average. Demand lower management explain how this could happen, threaten their jobs if this trend continues.
When I worked for the Feds in the early 1990s, I came down with a really horrendous cold and stayed home for 3 days, until I was fever-free, etc. HR policy was that if you were out for 3 consecutive days, you then needed a doctor’s note to return to work. So I then had to waste another half-day getting one. The doctor’s commentary: “So let me get this straight. I am supposed to write that you had a cold for 3 days, and you are now wasting my time and half a day of your time? Snd the government wants to reform health care, right?”
On my last job;
Zero sick time. Often impossible to get any (unpaid) time off, and if they do bother to explain why they turned you down, most of the time their explanation is a clear and obvious lie. Hell, in my time I saw two people get approved vacation, go on that vacation, and then come back to find they’d been fired or disciplined for “unexcused absences” because their vacation approval was mysteriously recinded after they left. That, my friends, is fucking evil.
Late or missing less than 2 hours work = 1/2 point.
Out > 2 hours or 1 day absence = 1 point.
With doctor’s note, absences of more than 1 day = 1 point.
3 points = Verbal Warning, stays on record for 90 days.
5 points = Written Warning, stays on record for 9 months. No possibility of promotion, sometimes held against people even after it expired.
8 points = Final Warning, stays on record for 1 year.
9 points = Termination.
So if you got to a written warning, you had 9 months in which you couldn’t have more than 3 absences or you’d hit a final. Once you hit a final, that was it. No absences for any reason for a year or you’re fired. Not surprisingly, termination for absenteeism was the leading cause of turnover.
I got a promotion to a senior attorney position, so now I have to attend management training. Interestingly enough, awesome trial lawyers don’t always make awesome people managers. 
But I swear, 90% of the training seemed to be all about CYA so you don’t get sued for employment discrimination. I think it is an area of the law where there is a really low bar to make a successful allegation of discrimination. I think most of HR’s job is to document everything, so that if they have to fire you, you have no grounds to turn around and sue.
This is not related to sick days but it is related to another HR function, employee evaluation process keeper.
I was working at my former job in a development program for new college grads. The manager for the development program was a very busy HR person who also championed T&E. She told all of us in the program all about the review process and how awesome and wonderful it would be. We would be given the opportunity to give specific examples of how awesome we are and why they shouldn’t fire us at the end of that rotation. What she didn’t realize was that the process was too long and too hard to do in an effective manner. After working there for about 7 months, she forwarded me a multipaged Excel spreadsheet with over 250 different specific behaviors I was supposed to exemplify with a rubric to describe success. After two weeks of giving specific examples and rating myself, my boss took one look at it, rated me low on two behaviors and down the middle on the rest. I soon realized that she trained the people in the program on the review process but not the people the new fledglings would report to. So my boss gave me a crappy rating because he didn’t like me but also because he didn’t know how it was supposed to work. That review was the final straw that made me look for a new job.
Note: I was really unhappy with this job long before the review and we both knew it wasn’t working out but I think there were at least some behaviors I did well on.
My husband has the same issue with migraines. He’s finally found meds that work but they make him loopy. Fortunately he has a boss who also has migraines so the boss just sighs sympathetically once or twice a year.
I wish! 
It really threw me for a loop when I read a couple weeks ago about some proposed law somewhere that all employees get paid sick time. I haven’t worked in as many different places as most people, but I was shocked that there still exists some jobs that don’t get paid sick time. Who do they think they’re hiring, robots? And even robots break down once in a while!
Owing to my experience working in restaurants and other low-level, front-line work, and knowing the experience of being on and off a good union, I am not one to turn around and say “I’ve got mine, so fuck everyone else”. Though I’m a supervisor and have employees, I’m still a union represented employee. I think that even if I were to make it to management someday and become non-represented, I would still side with the union. Its terrible to feel powerless at your job, to have management breathing down your neck for the smallest things, and to have idiots you work for abuse their power just because they can. I’ve resolved to never be one of those people, no matter what
Where I work, we do have pedantic rules for every little thing, but the good thing about working for a large organization is that it has to be run piecemeal by many many people. I’ve had both a great boss and a terrible boss here, and I take what I’ve learned from both and added my own beliefs to my management style. Giving people time off when they need it just seems common sense. Seriously, none of us are actors or presidents, if we’re out 1 or 2 days, the world’s not going to end. So if my staff needs to do something using their sick time, why not? What kind of a diabolical person refuses someone to take off time because they’re sick, or their kid is sick, or they have an important errand to run, or whatever? Lots of places aren’t open on weekends or have limited hours, the weekday is the only good time to accomplish some of these tasks.
Here, our hours are divided into sick, personal, and vacation. Vacation and personal require pre-approval, sick doesn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever denied a personal or vacation once in my half decade here. Its insanely stupid if you have all these hours saved but can’t use them. That’s always been my policy and I don’t think that will change anytime soon. I’ve heard of bosses here who loath to give out vacation time and it feels like there’s something wrong about that. Its your vacation. As long as you let your boss know a week ahead of time, there shouldn’t be any issues with it. Hell, my bosses are gone all the time either on vacation, training, “management seminars”, or other BS and we don’t miss them at all. Why should an employee’s absence make any difference? And employees have less time off, so that’s really saying something if a boss thinks being out somehow impacts the job. Assholes, they should get less time then. Anyways, sorry about the rant
That is exactly how it works where I’m at. Three full days of annual training, the same damn stuff every year. Each presentation begins by signing a sheet for HR that shows you are in attendance.
Then people in the large conference hall whip out a book, or smart phone or even some knitting. Because it isn’t really about paying attention to the training, it is only about that sheet of paper that says you received the training.
And he/she may have been correct! People usually consider average to be synonymous with the arithmetic mean. When you say 50% you are referring to the median. To make an obvious, albeit exreme exanple - lets say in a company of 10 employees, 6 take 5 days off and 4 take no days off, Then the mean time ioff is 3 days, but the median (50% of the employees) is 5 days.
And then you took the money you were skimming to your bank account and fled to Rio, which is where you are posting from, right? Seriously, I know the policy in at least some banks is that everyone must take at least a week of vacation in one chunk, because a sign of embezzlement is never letting anyone else see your stuff.
Not to mention what happens if you get run over by a bus. Your bosses are beyond stupid. When I was a manager, not having someone who could step into nearly every role fairly quickly made me really, really nervous.
That was basically the evaluation policy at Intel when I was there, quite a while ago. Not that they did the 50% under average thing - it was a few top, a few bad, 10% on the way out, and the rest in one big glob. And the the guy who got the fickle finger of fate at the one meeting I went to was not a real under-performer by any measure, just a sacrifice. After that meeting I moved quickly to the door.
(Though it might have been 5%, I don’t remember.)
I’ve never worked at a company which had a set number of sick days, so I know nothing of this. I’m kind of out sick today, but I’ve spent most of the time on-line solving several crises and doing planning. I think there might be some official policy, but no division I’ve ever been in paid the slightest attention to it. On the other hand, no one feels entitled to a set number of sick days either. I know lots of days go to another level, but no one I’ve worked for would be stupid enough to lose good talent to stupid policies.
I laughed at the OP talking about big, powerful, HR. HR has shrunk dramatically in the 30 years I’ve been working, and they are usually among the first to get zapped in a layoff. If there are stupid HR policies, which I don’t doubt there are, they are often imposed by pressure from the top. Someone sees the sick leave figures and yells at HR to do something. I’m not an HR person, but pretty much all HR people I’ve worked with in both hiring and firing have been damn good.
I think that’s true. Since HR people generally know nothing about the business they work for they’ll fall all over themselves fulfilling the wishes of upper management without any analysis or looking for any alternative solution to the perceived problem.
We get 5 days of paid sick time. We get a bonus if we dont take all 5 days. But if you are out sick 4 times you get a verbal warning. So if I go out sick 4 times for one day, Ill get reprimanded and get a bonus. HR sucks.
One benefit to working from home, my sick time has been almost nonexistant.
I don’t feel compelled to stay home to keep my illness to myself since I’m already at home. If I’m feeling really terrible I block off a couple of hours and have a nap but otherwise I just scale back on my effort and get on with what absolutely needs to be done.
What I blame is a culture of sycophantic sniveling and cowardice. Almost nobody has the guts to stand up to their boss and tell him that his ideas are bad, and we shouldn’t do it, and hold their ground.
At my job, I have told my employees that if I screw up, they need to call me on it. I tell them I’m not perfect, nobody is, and none of them should feel like there would be punishment for speaking out. I know, however, many bosses say that but don’t live up to it, so sometimes in meetings I would deliberately say something I know is stupid and see if they call me out. If they don’t, I tell them that they need to, because we can’t let people get away with stupid shit.
Also, I’ve debated the merits of something with my staff before. We don’t always agree, and when we disagree, I let them talk as long as they want about how they feel, and then I’ll point out the merits of my beliefs. Even if I still disagree with them, sometimes I’ll tell them to take it up with our higher boss. I don’t shut suggestions down from my employees if I disagree with them. I am not the be all, end all of efficiency improvements, so if I don’t agree, if they can convince a higher manager, I tell them they are free to bring it up.
Oh my god, I didn’t even get the true stupidity of this until you quoted it.
You think dealing with HR is a pain in the asshole? Try *being *in HR. Seriously, try having it be your job to attempt to navigate your way through this unwieldy doondoggle of a shit storm. I would have rather been the janitor there than do what I did. I later moved elsewhere within the company where my dealings with HR’s horse shit were fortunately limited.
Your HR department is… umm… well, different.
Hey, the top management has solutions. Keep on having meetings to figure out why productivity is dropping. And I’m sure that the feeling that one can be easily replaced doesn’t help.
I’ve heard lots of complaints about HR blocking candidates from getting to hiring managers, but since in my field HR has no clue about what makes a good candidate, I’ve never had that problem. But, like I said, I’ve never had to live through excessively stupid rules. And in the few cases I had to deal with dumb rules, I’ve had help from some HR people on how to get around them.