The only thing you do by keeping things running through heroic effort is to send a message to management that they can lower the priority of dealing with the issue.
Managing upwards (getting management to make decisions in your favor) means that you can’t let yourself be the reason they don’t feel the pain of a problem like poor staffing. Sure, you can step in and save the day if you really, truly, need to build up your reputation as dependable/hero, but it’s a thin thin line.
One thing I often do as well is try to look at people in other departments and their general attitudes towards time off, vacations, having to leave for Dr’s appointments, that sort of thing.
I’ll be damned if I’m going to live in a constant crunch time situation, feeling like I need to take lunch at my desk, and put off things I need to do for me.
Especially while other teams are having regular team building outings during work hours on the company dime, one guy takes a long lunch and to go to the gym, and two others were clearly taking the video call meeting while out walking their dog.
Everyone deserves consideration of the fact that they are human, and everyone deserves the kind of flexibility that often is only for business side “important” people.
Overtime solves this issue pretty effortlessly. They call you and offer a shift of overtime to cover someone that’s unexpectedly absent. If you’re willing to sacrifice your normal time off, you get time and a half in exchange. If you’re not, then either another person will or the manager/foreman on salary handles it. That is, after all, one of the reasons they’re paid more (and on salary.)
In my opinion, at a healthy workplace, someone taking time off shouldn’t be noticed
In a “healthy” capitalist environment, they take note of who can leave without any bumps in the road and lay them off
I used to have this boss who would get mad if anyone asked for 2 weeks off. She would say, “if you think the business can survive without you for that long, why do we pay you? Don’t bother coming back then”
That boss was a short-sighted moron. (I assume we all can see that). I hope that role is as high up the food chain as the Peter Principal will allow them to go.
1). Hiring is expensive, scouting, ads, interviews, and paying HR do process their onboarding and benifits. The rule of thumb Ive see previous managers use is the total cost to hire someone is 2-2.5 times their annual take-home. Not to mention the effectivness of a new hire learning the role costs the company real resources, time and effort to bring up to speed.
2). Your PTO is part of your compensation, and can be used within policy as you see fit. Failure to allow its appropriate use could be viewed as wage theft and there are very powerful leagl avenues (depending on location) to take if the case is big enough to bring against the employeer.
Within policy does a lot of heavy lifting.
It’s generally very simple (by intent) for the employer to deny PTO requests “within policy.”
The issue arises when multiple people all get sick at the same time, which is much more common than random chance would have it due to how contagious cold & flu (and COVID) are. A workplace that can handle half the staff gone for a day without falling behind is gonna struggle to find stuff for people to do when everyone is there.
This is reason for having more lenient sick policies, not less. Generally only symptomatic people are contagious (COVID being an exception). Even mildly sick people should be encouraged to stay home until fully recovered to lower the risk of spreading it to the rest of the office.
That can help, though the office isn’t the only transmission vector. Schools, grocery stores, restaurants, public transit, etc. are all major vectors. Families with early school-age children especially tend to get sick a lot, as young children learn and play in close proximity but don’t tend to follow good hygiene habits.
There’s also just the issue that in any environment with multiple people, it only takes one infected person to infect everyone else. Different people have different tolerances for illness as well as varying severity of symptoms. Someone with mild symptoms may come to work/school anyway and the whole room gets sick.
Have you never been in a position of management? You think absences should never be noted or logged?
You might need to reconsider this.
I once listened to a presentation by a guy who had this really elaborate plan, based on everyone doing their jobs absolutely perfectly, with nothing going wrong at all. If anything skipped a beat, anywhere along the way, the entire house of cards would come down.
I asked what would happen if someone didn’t accomplish their objectives, and he said they would. But what if they didn’t? They will. That’s when I said, you aren’t taking the human factor into account, and he said that the solution is to “fire the human, and get a new human.”
Meanwhile, “Nobody wants t’ werk!!!”.
Okay, cool. What happens while you’re training that new human? Trainees will operate at substantially less efficiency than expected while learning and may for a while afterwards too, depending on complexity of the work. What happens if one of those humans gets hurt or sick?
Dude really was a moron, wasn’t he?
Dude really was a moron, wasn’t he?
A leading hypothesis is management are fucking stupid. Throw them back into the trenches. Let them do some actual work for a few years
It’s easy to tell which managers were promoted from within and which were external hires with no hands on experience.
I don’t think hands on experience is necessary, but you need to have a comprehensive understanding of the work being done by people you oversee. That becomes increasingly difficult as your position moves you from the front line, which I think is one reason upper management and executives often seem like aliens compared to the rank and file and lower management.
Throw them back into the trenches.
The problem there is that eventually you don’t have trenches any more.
He’s not the only one. The Neo-Feudalists really think they are the only human species that exists whilst everyone else is a Neanderthal Serf
What happens while you’re training that new human?
My managers always had a simple solution to this problem: pretend that new programmers fresh out of college require no on-the-job training at all. Or for bonus points, pretend that they’re even better than the guys who have been doing this for decades and pay them more.
Nah, new humans aren’t trained in this day and age anymore. Managers just say to use AI instead. We can see this with the high unemployment rate of graduates.
I would like to add - fuck those managers that try to make scheduling issues around your sick days your problem. Over the last few years, I’ve heard of more and more jobs where the manager expects you, the sick person, to find coverage for your shift in order to call out. That is, you’re expected to call around your coworkers and find someone who will work your shift for you… yes, even if you’ve got no voice or are busy puking your brains out. Somehow, this practice has become prevalent in some jobs in the US. I worry about the younger workers who accept this as normal. It is not normal, and should never be normal!
The manager is paid to manage the employees - including finding coverage when someone’s sick. If you ever find yourself in a job where a manager tries to make you find your replacement before “permitting” you to call out, GTFO out of there! It’s a fucked up practice and sane employers don’t pull that shit.
(For all the Europeans reading - yes, this is real. Yes, we need better labor laws.)
Guillotines, even for the low level tyrants.
Caskets with flesh-eating worms for them!
gtfo and maybe start a couple fires on your way to the door
In Europe, there are companies that offer unlimited paid time off. In practice apparently people take less time off than when they have a fixed amount of leave because they feel a responsibility towards their coworkers.
In my opinion, entrepreneurship is a high risk/high rewards game. Employees getting sick is part of the risk, and if you can’t handle that you shouldn’t be running a business.
I know in the US it’s incredibly easy to let people go, in the end if specialist workers get scarce, not accepting sick days will ruin your business. In Europe not accepting sick days is simply not an option.
I am convinced treating people well prevents things like burnout. And preventing burnouts and churn gives you a competitive advantage.
I’m a school bus driver in the US. Not only do we not get unlimited PTO, even for our paid holidays we don’t get paid for them unless we show up for the workdays before and after the paid holidays. This is so that we don’t attempt to stretch the long weekend that a Friday or Monday holiday provides by taking extra sick days before or after. I was a programmer most of my working life and I never encountered any time-off like this, but the other drivers say this is common in “blue-collar” jobs.
TBF our bosses have absolutely no flexibility in terms of the work that has to be done. A bus route needs to be covered or else 100 kids don’t make it to school. We have standby drivers but not an unlimited number of them. The day after the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl, about a third of our drivers called in “sick” and the transportation director had no choice but to cancel multiple routes. I was more pissed at our drivers than she was – we’re almost all in our 60s and 70s (and a few are in their 80s) and have no business drinking ourselves into massive hangovers. I’m actually surprised nobody died.
Nvidia offers that here, unlimited time off and a focus on work/life balance. They don’t do layoffs. Seems to be working out well for them, given they’re the most valuable company right now.
It’s true and i agree but it’s still my coworker suffering the consequences.
Meh, they should take days off too then, don’t be an apologist. Pitting against fellow workers is not the way.
TIL feeling bad for my coworkers makes me an apologist
You need to stop thinking in twitter posts and start thinking in terms of reality.
What do you mean you “deserve” sick days? Aren’t you legally given those?
For instance, I can call in two days a month and say “I’m sick, staying home, not working”. If I’m not that badly off, then I can call in as much as I want (within reason) and say “I’m sick but working from home”. At any point, I can say “I’m sick, going to hospital”.
No. We are not given those.
The people who we trust to secure those rights for us that you take for granted are useless unless they’re blocking progress.
Few American employers provide actual sick days. Instead you can pull from your pool of paid time off (which doubles as vacation for many jobs, although some do have a separate vacation pool that can only be used for scheduled time off) or just have an unpaid absence.
No. I don’t get any sick days at all for any reason. There are two kinds of leave at my job: scheduled, and unscheduled. If it was preapproved 2+weeks in advance by you submitting a slip and the boss signing it and then getting back to you, then it was scheduled. Anything else is unscheduled, and technically I can be disciplined for it.
That fucking sucks mate.
I know this doesn’t happen often in practice, but I absolutely cover my teams time off (for what ever reason). Our clients don’t pay us enough to have extra staff standing around when everyone is healthy, so I’m the coverage plan. 😕
By the way, this also applies for “unforeseen problems” which “made the project go behind schedule” and “now we’re going to work extra hard” (meaning overtime without pay).
It’s up to management to not only account and prepare for Known Unknowns (problems known to happen but not if, when and how severe - for example employee sickness), but even have margin for Unknown Unknowns (problems that nobody expected).
In fact, half way competent managers will do enough analysis and research upfront to transform many otherwise Know Unknowns into Known Knowns (we know this will happen) and Unknown Unknowns into Known Unknowns - sometimes things are only “totally unexpected” because the necessary upfront research and preparation hasn’t been done.
Managing this is literally the core job of low-level and mid-level managers, so if they try and dump on you the responsibility for it or try and extract from you out of contract work to make up for it, they are literally acting in the most selfish personal upside maximizing way possible and just covering their own incompetence.
It is not up to you to make sure an incompetent asshole gets a bonus for doing a shit job and overpromising.
This is literally they kind of situation where, unless you’re for example reciprocating equivalent leeway from said manager towards you in the past (say, the kind that’ll actually quietly let you go home early if you’re having a bad day), you absolutely have the moral high ground to leave it to them to sort it out with whomever THEY are accountable to (be it a client they made deadline promises to based on a plan that would only ever work in the perfect zero-problems situation or their own manager).
Called off work on Friday because I accidentally fucked up my back Thursday night and woke up unable to move without excruciating pain. My boss left me on read. Didn’t even fucking reply.
Manager: “Ya know, you’re really putting me in a tight spot here…”
Me: “Oh, yeah, I know all about tight spots. Kinda like how every day I work my ass off, and at the end of the month barely have enough money to keep my head above water, all without having medical coverage. I make too much for medicaid, but I definately can’t afford a doctor. Which is kinda scary and all. You know…since I just over beating cancer in 2023. Not like cancer ever comes back, or has post complications…”
And then I walk away from the conversation.
I’ve found at places of employment, the best way to not get walked all over, is to be a reflection of how big of an asshole THEY are being in the moment. They can’t call me out onit, because it’s exactly their behavior. They won’t fix the issues, because the issue is them, or above them. So it ends up being more of a headache than it’s worth to talk to me.
Now I just get called into an office.
“Did you do the new company policy?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Because fuck that shit. I can achieve the same goal you’re telling me to work at for an hour, in about 15 seconds. All the extra bullshit is just busy work, and I don’t do that.”
Long pause
sigh "Just get back to work…
Guys, I’m telling you. All you gotta do is be an immovable rock in your stance, and work a job that would be really hard to replace you. Then just be dependable. Show up to work every day. Don’t be late. Do the work. But don’t take shit.
They’ll be presented with “do I really fire a worker who shows up and works the shifts no one else wants? Can I replace him?”
The answer may be yes, but it’s still a hell of a process that’s already solved by simply NOT firing you.
You’d get fired pretty fast from a lot of places for that behavior. That made up scenario just reeks of Reddit.
You’re not as hard to replace as you think you are.
I see other people talk to their bosses like that sometimes. I’m always shocked at how blunt they are in a clearly hostile business arrangement, but these guys do exist.
Makes me thank my lucky stars my boss is just a normal person.
I mean don’t get me wrong you gotta assert your boundaries, but I’d just say “no” and not offer a detailed reason. You can hear how I really feel while I’m on the clock. 😜
Like yeah if you’re good work buddies that’s fine, but it’s a great way to get fired for insubordination and general “dude you’re a dick” reasons if applied to all employers.
I’d fire them in a heartbeat. I’ll gladly cover a couple extra shifts a week for a few weeks if it means I don’t have to endure a colossal asshole killing morale on my team.
I love if I take a day off be it sick or vacation and no one does my job and I come into 2x the works. And vacations are a nightmare, now its 2 weeks of work stacked.
This is so different industry by industry. Some can build in redundancy to cover employee leave yet still have something to do when everyone is healthy.
For many other companies, particularly in reference to hourly employees, having too many employees in the same position to cover call outs means scheduling gets diluted among them, which leads to lower earnings for all employees and higher turnover.
I pro worker and anti abusive management, but vague generalized posts like these feel disingenuous or at least not well thought out.
This kinda shit only gets written and spread by people who either have never been management or are really shitty management.
There’s way too many nuances to being a “good boss” to sum up in one dumb tweet.
My first impression is that a child wrote it.
Management or not, the older you are, the more opportunities you would have had to understand it’s more nuanced than that.
Labor market faces so many issues on both sides between overworked salaried employees, average and minimum wages not keeping up with inflation, decline in education standards putting out lower quality candidates, jobs shifting towards gig and independent contractor positions that punish independence, and so many things. This just comes off as a novice brat who didn’t like how they were made to feel.
Eh, it can definitely be abused. Worked a union job and we were allowed so many sick days which you were supposed to accumulate so that if you like, broke your leg you could potentially have like 6 months of sick time to recover.
But one guy would just call in sick every Friday basically and we had to cover his extra duties. He wasn’t sick, just abused the system.
So you’re saying the system was abused because someone used every sick day available to him?
Why not let that be a problem for the management and enjoy your fair sick days?
Because the intention is to use the time when you are actually sick not use it to work 4-day work weeks. And using it like that means when the guy actually needs 6 months off for an emergency he won’t have the sick time to use, so basically puts all that work back on us double. And people who use it in the unintended way are why a lot of workplaces don’t offer lots of sick time for emergencies. Instead eventually we will only get the minimum 5 days per year that resets annually instead of accumulating and then they hire another worker with the savings.
Yes that helps with the workload but the rest of us get screwed since we won’t have an emergency backup of sick time to use anymore because someone used it in an unintended way.
the reason bosses suck is the workers actually
stop victim blaming boot licker
Typical Redditor mentality.
Why didn’t you do the same? I would have.
Us workers need to have some solidarity for each other otherwise employers will take advantage.
At the end of the day we are all but numbers in some assholes spreadsheet, they would reduce the numbers in a heartbeat. It business. The sooner you understand that the easier it will get.
Because it wasn’t some million dollar corporation exploiting employees. Some jobs actually have decent employers and I knew all it would do is make work harder for my coworkers. Personally I view it as a dick move to do.
It was a non profit animal sanctuary so not only do the workers get shafted the animals the guy was supposed to care for also got shafted.
Not every employer is bent on exploiting employees, but when employees treat every employer as if they are it makes it harder for the good ones to provide decent working conditions.
Employees can absolutely take advantage of employers and I think its silly that people think all employers all evil and all employees are innocent victims that should exploit everything.
Because your coworkers have to work harder in your absence? Stop being such a selfish prick.
I am sorry I don’t understand the logic here, the employer not hiring enough people and then making the workers feel bad for taking time off is the actual selfish behavior here.
Even a fully staffed property isn’t going to have people that just sit around and wait for shifts to fill.
Someone will have to cover your missed shifts or work harder in your absence. If you’re sick, call in sick. But don’t just randomly call in because you want another day off. Schedule it in advance.
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