Having read a couple of books/articles on progressive management, I’ve come to the conclusion that these people don’t know what they’re talking about. They seem to be an endless variety of would-be-know-it-alls who have read a couple of books and decided that if they chose another metaphor, they could repackage what everyone else wrote and make the bestseller list selling to people who couldn’t figure out how to implement the ideas on the other books, books which turn out to be the source material for the current book.
These books preach “your employees are people too, show them respect,” or “Clamp down on these clowns like your name was Machiavelli.” Either way, they generally agree that something that’s not currently done needs to be implemented to get new results (stands to reason, right?). One clever idea that I’ve seen bandied about is, "give your employees so much freedom they won’t know what to do with it and eventually will spend more [productive] time at the office. This presupposes that you have hard workers to begin with of course.
Anyway, one thought that I haven’t seen in these books is: why not give employees unlimited sick days/days off?
Before implementing this, you will have to 1) make sure that they won’t take advantage of this and 2) make it clear that while days are essentially “free,” they are still expected to get their jobs done and at a certain level of quality. Hopefully, days off will be planned in advance so staffing conflicts could be avoided.
Most of the reading I’ve done comes to the conclusion that people would actually spend more time at their desks and working (or perhaps working from home) because they actually feel like they are letting someone down if they use their days off.
Although I am not an HR representative, I think it would be a good idea to give employees more days off (similar to the French - I think they have 4-6 weeks off), though I don’t think that unlimited days off would work. There will always be someone there who would abuse that. I think the possibility of this working is dependent upon many things, such as work load, possibly sector, of course the personality of the employee, their accountability and relative importance in the workplace (i.e., do the know that unless they get their work done the place will not run smoothly? If they feel they don’t matter, they’d be more likely to abuse your generosity)., and other factors. However, it would be an interesting experiment to see whether this would work.
It would work quite well for people who have a finite workload and for those that are able (or allowed) to manage their schedules properly; some scenarios where I could see it not working well:
-Employees to whom work can be delegated without any definite limit, finding themselves unable to take time off because they get piled on.
-Individuals who are good at doing their job when there is a regime in force, but poor otherwise (people who have a tendency to ‘put off until tomorrow’)
As someone who has been in a management position for 20 years, I can assure you that there would be problems. While you always have employees who are personally responsible and make sure to complete their duties on schedule and are willing to schedule their personal life around their work life, you will also have employees that would take advantage of the policy. There would be discipline problems because of their refusal to accept personal responsibility for their duties if they were taking off time while not getting their work completed.
It is also conceivable that you could have an star employee who would have their work completed but virtually never be in the office. This would only be a problem if their interaction with coworkers or clients was required on a regualr basis.
Dismissal for abuse of such a scheme is hardly a solution, as it can be very disruptive and expensive in itself, and there are some people (possibly even some sorts of position) where active management of workflow (including time off) is necessary, or at least is less of a task than deling with firing and hiring/training a continual stream of staff.
Another scenario where it might not work well is a team that deal with a large pool of small, discrete jobs, such as a call centre - the calls are dealt with by the members of staff that are there on that day; by design, if you take a day off, somebody else does the work.
Lightnin, I agree with you. However, with today’s HR regulations most employers find themselves so wrapped up in red tape that it’s almost impossible to “fire” someone without first creating a documentation trail to CYA.
As for your sick rule, I’ve always preached that one. Stay Home! Don’t bring that crap into the office!
If these hypothetical workers have even half of a work ethic, they won’t know what to do with all the time off.
I’ve got 42 days of time off available to me this year. I’ve only managed to use 11 of them so far. I’ll probably wind up taking a couple “PTO Burn” weeks in October and November just so I don’t lose the time as we can roll forward no more than five days to the next year.
Ah! But Bob wasn’t fired at all! Bob’s position was “downsized” and his presence was no longer required! All perfectly legal, even if you hire someone to replace him for a position that technically does not exist! No settlement for you, Bob. Better take an extra dose of Enzyte.
From all I’ve seen, the ability to successfully sue an employeer for wrongfull termination is pretty tough. You hear about the rare, big ones, but I believe they are in the minority. The little working man is usually knuckled under pretty easily. Especially in states like Nevada where no cause is needed at all to terminate employment.
What I would see as a major stumbling block to the “unlimited time off policy” is the health care providers. They require minimum hours worked to maintain coverage and eligabiltiy.
Where I work, I barely make the minimum to be considered “full time” (hey, I like to spend time with my kid!) and we actually had a guy that called in sick so often that his status was going to be changed to “part time” and thus, ineligable for health coverage under our plan! (that problem eventually solved itself)
I work in a factory, and it would never work here. If business is good, then there’s enough work for everybody, and we need the predictability of having people at work. Saturday nights and NFL Sundays are bad enough as it is.
Well, in my line of work, the effect would be that I’d never get the hell out of the clinic and, I don’t know, do piddly things like feed my own dogs and see my husband. We schedule enough people to get the expected amount of work done without anyone having to stay excessively late, and somebody not coming in means everyone else has to work that much harder and often that much longer. That’s why we are expected to either put in a vacation notice at least a month in advance, or find someone to fill the shift ourselves.
I guess in that sense, we do kind of have unlimited time off already; we can trade shifts all we want. As long as I can find someone to cover my shifts and am able to cover an equivalent number of their hours, I can take off as much and as often as I like. Of course, we’ve got people who try to abuse even this policy–they ask you to work for them, but they never quite seem able to find a day they can work for you. I’ve gotten burned that way a few times, and I’m no longer available to cover for those people.
At any rate, having a policy that as long as your share of the work is done, you don’t have to come in simply wouldn’t work for us. Your share of the work can’t get done if you’re not in the clinic, and your absence will create a hardship for the people who actually do show up. For the same reasons, that policy wouldn’t work for any other type of healthcare, factory work, food service, retail, call centers, etc.
I can think of two real-life examples of what would happen:
IBM used to give 52 weeks sick leave in any 24 month period and I never saw anybody try to abuse that. In a free economy, most workers want to work hard so they can get ahead and/or feel good about their career.
In the USSR, since you were pretty much guaranteed a job, there was no penalty for calling in sick either. However, since there wasn’t any incentive for working hard either, absenteeism was a huge problem.
Of course if you gave employees unlimited hours to scan the Straight Dope at work, that would lead to the end off all work in Western Civilization.
Where I work, we do have ‘unlimited’ sick days. However, if you miss 3 in a row, you need a note from a doctor and employees with exessive absenteism feel it when review time comes around. I’ve reaped the advantages of not being sick for a few years now.
Depends on the job. There are places where it could work well without abuse, and others where it would be a disaster (Police, production line, air-traffic control, Army…).
Would probably work best with knowledge workers, where there is a lower correlation between hours put in and productivity.
In Wisconsin at least, this won’t work. In order to successfully argue that you’ve eliminated the job, you cannot hire someone else to do that same work until 90 days have passed.
You’re pretty much correct, but what most employers are avoiding is not a possible negative court verdict, but rather the lawyer and court costs themselves. Even if the company wins in the end, it is still extremely expensive. That is why most companies go to great lengths to ensure that all their Ts are crossed and their Is are dotted.
Not to mention the time it takes from everyone’s schedule to collect all the documentation, meet with lawyers, do depositions, more meeting with lawyers, time spent in court, etc. Even if you win, you have lost.
Been down that road, won the case but lost a lot of staff time. There was a total of 3 years elapsed time between incident and trial so you can just imagine the amount of time spent doing all the above.
