Keep Typhoid Mary at Home
November 2004
The holidays are coming, and with them the seventeen trillion germs that accompany winter, rainy days, and children home from school. These germs march through today’s re-circulated air-filled offices like Ghengis Khan. Add to that the amount of paper circulating through our modern so-called paperless offices, and you have a recipe for disaster: just sit back and listen to the phone ring with folks calling in sick.
There is a temptation amongst many corporations, businesses and managers to limit sick time, and to discourage its use. It will come to no surprise to you that I have many, and strong, opinions on this. However, they can be succinctly expressed. Sick people oughta stay home!
“I can’t afford to pay sick time or cover their work while they are gone,” you shriek in response. Well, you can’t afford to pay for the entire office or workgroup to get sick, either, and that is exactly what is going to happen if you take the shortsighted approach, and make your employees feel like villains if they call in sick.
I’ll never forget one Christmas Eve years ago. Everyone in the office had been talking about their holiday plans for weeks before. The last-minute buzz of excitement filled the air. You know how it is. One fellow was not feeling the cheer so much, though. He was miserably, brutally ill with the flu. He had been getting sicker and sicker over the previous few days, and we’d all been begging him to stay home. However, the company’s sick leave policy was just this side of draconian, and he insisted on coming in. His children had been ill that year, and he’d had to take a lot of sick time to help care for them. He couldn’t afford either the docked time, or the hit on the absence-ratio portion of his performance evaluation.
So day after day, he struggled valiantly into work, and day after day he sneezed and coughed and generally performed your basic Typhoid Mary activity. Like wildfire, those germs, they traveled. Far and wide, through a geographically spread out workforce. Via memos, via people moving about. It was sort of like watching measles spread - or it would have been if we could have seen it. The incubation period on this lovely ‘flu was such that much of the plant had one of the most miserable Christmas holidays ever. First they and then in many cases, their families, were laid low. When the four-day weekend was over, many of the thousands who worked there were ready to lynch this poor fellow. (At least those of us who worked right with him and KNEW where the germs had come from were certainly ready to.) Everyone else was just mighty mad to have to be back at work on top of it all.
Now, in that particular case, the company did not get hit with the main brunt of the sick days, but you can bet that they paid for it. Everyone else was coming to work ill because they had to or felt they had to, as well. Remember all the talks we’ve had about morale? A business full of martyrs doesn’t make for strong company morale.
This was just one incident – it happens all the time in offices where the work ethic is, for whatever reason, opposed to employees who are ill, staying home.
I had one boss I’ll never forget. He was proud of his perfect attendance record over a 15-year period. Very proud. I swear if they’d given him a merit badge, he’d have worn it every day. Possibly on his forehead. He found a way to work it into many a conversation, particularly conversations with his Less Perfect Than Him Employees. It was clear that his perfect attendance record conferred upon him a special level of work maturity, a level of Calvinist perfection that he shone with, and a moral imperative for us all to follow. I cannot estimate how many times he made his superiority clear to me. At that time, I was one of the other breed found in every office – I was the one who got everything that everyone else brought in, and I was the one who stayed home when I was sick.
I was also the one who made a new career out of creatively calling in sick, but that’s another story and another column. So this fellow – let’s call him Mr. Perfect - has his wisdom teeth out one day. All four of them, I believe. Now, I’ve had that done, and it is no fun. When you have had all four of your wisdom teeth out, you are not at your most effective. There is usually some level of pain medication required, further reducing your acute grasp of business. Our hero, Mr. Perfect came on out to work. Of course he did. He wasn’t going to let some little thing like having four wisdom teeth removed stop him from coming to work and setting an example for his employees. So he did. In past all of us he marched, along about eleven a.m. Into his office, slightly puffy of mien, but steely in his determination. Where he promptly closed the door, lay down on the floor, and slept for the rest of the day.
Needless to say, he set quite an example for all of us. We talked for days about his example. Oh, did we talk. Believe me, this is not the kind of example you want to set. So make sure your folks know that if they are unhealthy, and particularly if they are contagious, you would like them to stay home. Perhaps they can work from home, if something they are doing is time-sensitive.
Besides, you don’t want them infecting your customers either. If clients catch the ‘flu at your place of business, they won’t be very happy. And we want happy clientele. Don’t worry about the malingerers in your office – you know who they are anyway. I’m talking about people who are truly ill. These folks should be home, getting better, so that you don’t lose even more productivity in a secondary infection – whether it is theirs, someone else in the office, or even worse, you! Take care of your customers and your employees – ‘cause that is good business.
Ramona Abbott helps businesses maximize their efficiency, effectiveness and group dynamics. She utilizes proven techniques that are fun and affordable to help you improve your workplace in a variety of ways. She welcomes inquiries at 360-398-2606 or ramona@EssentiallyProfessional.com
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