Thursday · 27 February 2020

Caring days and the school absence note

Posted by Call In Sick Tips Revealed · Filed under Sick Leave · Permalink

A large share of what gets recorded as sick leave is not the employee's illness at all. It is somebody else's: a child sent home from school, a parent after a fall, a partner who cannot be left alone for a day. The categories most workplaces use have no room for this, so it gets filed under whichever heading causes the least trouble.

The mismatch has consequences beyond bookkeeping. Absence connected to caring is often predictable in aggregate and completely unpredictable on the day, which is a different management problem from illness and would benefit from different arrangements. Filed as personal sickness, it also distorts an individual's record in ways that can follow them for years.

Two documents, two systems

Parents of school-age children end up operating in two paperwork systems at once that were designed without reference to each other. A school wants to know why a child was away and often requires a note; an employer wants to know why an adult was away and may require something else entirely. The same twenty-four hours generates two accounts, and neither system asks about the other.

Schools that ask for the reason but not for evidence, and workplaces that provide a named category for dependants' leave, both reduce the amount of invention in the system considerably. Where no such category exists, people supply the explanation that fits the available box, which is how a child's stomach bug becomes an adult's.

What a usable arrangement looks like

The common features of policies that work here are unremarkable. A named entitlement for time to deal with a dependant, separate from personal sickness. A short notice route that does not require a manager to be reached in person at seven in the morning. An expectation stated in advance about what happens when a school closes at short notice, so that the conversation is not conducted for the first time in a crisis.

It is also worth acknowledging in the policy that the first day of a dependant's illness is usually about arrangement rather than nursing: finding cover, moving appointments, collecting somebody. That day is not the same as a week of care, and treating them identically is one of the reasons this area produces so much friction.

Caring absence is not going to reduce. Making it visible in its own right is the only way an organisation can plan for it at all.