I have run across many companies - not all ones I’ve worked for, but in the area - that seem to do this. This is possibly a US-only phenomenon.
Even though you are really sick they want you to come in because there is so much work. I would have thought that if the emplyee took a couple of days off they’d get better faster, foster less resentment, and possibly not spread the disease around all over the company.
Same with vacation time. A couple of weeks of vacation a year seem to really improve the health and morale of most companies.
Yet there are many companies who begrudge these. Why? What benefit is it to them? Do they *want * to run their employees into the ground? Why don’t we have more value set on employees’ emotional well-being as well as mental?
This country was built on the motto of “Work harder, not smarter.” It’s only in the past few decades that people have begun to figure out that, although this can work, it isn’t much fun, and people want their jobs to be fun, so it’s been changing.
However, there are still plenty of bosses & management types who think they can overschedule and overcommit and trust to their minions to put their shoulder to the boulder and get the job done, and if people start whining about not being able to breathe or needing to have their appendix out, well, sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and sometimes it gets the kick!
It doesn’t just happen in the US though it’s probably more common there.
I used to work on a probational non-permanent basis for a company here in Ireland. After half a year they called me into the office and said they wouldn’t as yet make me permanent because I had been sick too often.
I really wish I had had the guts to ask whether really wanted me to come into work sick or whether they didn’t believe me when I rang in sick.
Coincidentally a week later a job agency rang me completely unexpectedly a year after I had given them my CV as they were desperate for Dutch speakers (which I am). Had my employer not criticised my sick days I would have told the agency I was no longer looking for a job. As it was I told them I was listening and took great satisfaction in handing in my notice at the first job about three weeks afterward.
In my current job my manager’s has been known to almost order me home if I look like I’m ill or worn out.
Regarding vacation, I’ve had managers who simply were poor planners, so they would freak out when I told them I was taking some of my earned vacation, even though I was giving them lots of notice.
Maybe I work with an exceptionally pissy group, but it seems like illness is a no-win situation. If you come in, everyone complains that you’re spreading the plague. If you stay home, everyone bitches that they have to pick up your slack. When forced to make a choice, I come in, so that at least I get credit for giving it the old college try.
I have no answer as to why taking vacation should ever be a problem, provided that there’s sufficient notice and coverage.
Well, I think the short answer is that some companies really don’t give a crap about your emotional or physical well-being.
Also managers like to pretend that your work is of such importance that you can’t not do it for a few days because, my God, it’s so fricking important. And they are the manager or such important work, so that makes them really, really important.
Reminds me of the Y2K work I did that required department managers to rate the importance of their computer systems. Pretty well every single program in the company ended up rated as ‘mission-critical’.
I think the companies we work for (in the US) just don’t give a damn about the workers. If they did we would not have issues like we do these days. Compare the average starting vacation in the US vs employers in Europe. We’re talking days vs weeks here. I hate, really hate, the lack of sick, vacation, and personal time afforded to working professionals in the US. And the stock answer is if you don’t like it then too bad. Good luck finding another job that offers more, its like one big cartel.
I’ve seen it go both ways. I had one boss at a “big company who didn’t care about its employees” say “go home, you are sick. If we needed you that much we’d pay you a hell of a lot more.” And another tell me that five days off for the flu (where I ended up in the hospital on IVs for dehydration) was too much.
To some extent it seems to be about control and dinking people around. The bosses that did this to me have usually:
micromanaged
been unqualified for their position in other ways
been acting as a boss in an “unofficial” capacity (i.e. team leads)
had unreasonable expectations in general
seemed personally unhappy
I also think I, perhaps, have changed. Early in my career I felt this a lot from my bosses - but I was easier to push around, needed the job more, and was more likely to take little throw away comments as disapproval. I haven’t felt like anyone cared if I called in sick since I reached a point in my career where I said “I’m home sick” instead of “I really don’t feel well, is it ok if I take the day off,” where my boss is more afraid of me quitting mid project then I’m afraid of getting fired over something as stupid as taking earned vacation, and where I assume that “is your daughter feeling better, she seems to get a lot of ear infections?” is an expression of concern and not a criticism that I was out of the office because she had another ear infection.
Oh, I take as many sick days as I want. If I’m out longer than two weeks at a time, its short term disability. My starting vacation was two and a half weeks - not a lot by European standards, but the pay was better than we pay the equivalent position in Europe (I work for a global company), and its more than we offer in the Far East - but in Malaysia a smaller paycheck goes ALOT farther. European workers for my firm start with as much vacation as they will ever get…we add days with service until we match what they get - and we are still paid better. Asian workers max out at just over slightly more than we get starting out.
Well, my company does not offer paid sick time…So last week Co-worker A was sick and he gave it to me and 4 other people, including a poor girl that was visiting and training under me.
So she took the disease back to TX and infected half of her office.
So me and several others have been sitting at our desks, being miserable and less than productive because we are all so doped up on decongestants etc.
Here’s something from the other side of the aisle. I manage a small group in a medium-ish sized company. In the department in which I work, the rules are pretty simple: no-one gets hassled about sick time unless one of these conditions exist:
They take more sick days in a year than they earned that year, or they run out of sick time and have to take unpaid time off, because they’ve been out sick so much. Depending on how often this has happened, this will garner the employee an informal discussion expressing concern, to a verbal warning. If nothing changes, the discipline could increase through written warnings to eventual firing.
They are sick in a reliable pattern, like always on Mondays or Fridays. As above, depending on frequency this could result in a verbal warning, followed by further discipline up to and including dismissal.
In other words, don’t abuse the system and we won’t hassle you. We don’t want people to come in sick, it just makes everything worse (you take longer to recover, you spread the disease to other people), and I hate it when other managers or supervisors come in and work sick because they think they’re indispensable (or they’re afraid for the rest of us to find out that they’re not!).
So no, the managers in my department are not interested in micromanaging, controlling, or dinking people around. We don’t have time for that, we’re too freaking busy. I’m not surprised that such managers exist in some places, but I have been lucky enough not to ever work for any of them.
Having been a manager that got the short end many a night for many years at a restaurant, I can say that the reason why I was bitter about it was because my boss, good man that he was, continually shortstaffed the shift, leaving me to fend for myself.
I believe, although I can’t prove it, that the reason they get so worked up is because they try to run with a bare minimum of people and when someone takes time off it makes the bosses have to come in or it doesn’t get done. Dealing with labor is always a crapshoot. If you have too much people quit because they’re not getting enough hours, but if you have too little you take it in the shorts when they get sick or take vacations.
Yeah, the American cultural thing of Live to Work is annoying as hell. Not only do a lot of corporate assholes frown on taking any time off but they brag about how little sleep they got last night or how many hours they’ve put in this week. Who cares? Sounds to me like you’re just bad at managing your time.
Wow, the same one I read said that 40% of sick days are on Mondays or Fridays.
Obviously there’s humor here – Mondays and Fridays are 2/5ths of the work week – but the point remains that if someone consistently gets “sick” on Monday or Friday, but never mid-week, it’s likely they’re stretching their weekend.
I’ve worked for companies that kept track of sick/vacation days separately, and those who wrapped it all together into Personal Time Off. I much prefer the latter. With 5 sick days and 10 vacation days, an employee who doesn’t get sick but uses up their vacation time finds themselves having to lie in order to receive part of their compensation package. Otherwise, they’ve worked to earn the sick time, but just lose it because they took care of their health? With 15 PTO days, the healthy employee isn’t penalized and there’s no dancing around the issue of whether someone’s honestly sick or not. If they’re scheduling a vacation, let your manager know in advance. If you call in sick, deduct a PTO day from your balance.
Of course, if employees call in every Friday or Monday morning and say they can’t come in that day, then eyebrows can be raised.
That’s exactly what happens in my industry. Payroll always, always gets cut right after holidays, during the summer, and at the beginning of the week. The profit margin’s so low that it costs the company more to have a number of employees scheduled for a particular day. Instead, they cut the schedule to a bare minimum, the work load’s the same, and everybody is expected to get everything done within a certain time frame. No OT.
True story: The first year I was with my current employer, I made it clear 6 months in advance that I was getting married on Day X and our honeymoon will be from Y to Z. I told our HR person, my manager, her manager, had myself X’d out on the “official calendar” – everything was set. Turned out that our honeymoon had to be cut short because I was the only one who could do special orders outside of my manager, and she had her hands full enough as it was. So, like a good [strike]sap[/strike] employee, I complied because I honestly thought I’d be fired.
My husband thought, and still thinks I’m nuts for remaining in the industry. I’m so used to it by now that it doesn’t even get a blip on the Kiz radar. It’s the nature of the business shrug
Perhaps I’m lucky in that regard: Although we seperate personal and vacation you’re given the option of selling unused personal time back to the company (use or lose vacation though). No carryover of personal or vacation from year to year though. At least I’ve finally reached the three weeks per year level for vacation. :rolleyes:
My ex-wife is a registered nurse. I was always amused by the snotty attitude of the caring professionals where she worked. If I rang up to tell them that she was at death’s door and couldn’t come to work I was guaranteed some shitty well-OK-if-she-can’t-be-bothered-coming response. It was tempting to tell them to find new jobs more suited to their misanthropic character.