Monday · 10 February 2020

How small teams cover an absence

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

In a team of four, one absence is a quarter of the capacity and usually the whole of some particular capability. Everything written about absence management assumes a pool of interchangeable staff and a rota; small teams have neither, and so they improvise, generally in the same handful of ways.

The most common improvisation is deferral. The absent person's work waits for them and is done at double rate on their return, which is why so many people describe coming back as worse than staying. This is not cover at all; it is a loan, and the interest is paid by the person who was ill.

The single-owner problem

The real constraint is rarely time. It is that one person is the only one who can sign the thing, hold the relationship, or remember why the system was built that way. Cross-training is the standard remedy and it is usually attempted at the wrong moment, during an absence, when the person who knows is unavailable.

Small teams that handle absence well tend to have done something modest in advance: a written note of where things are for each recurring task, a second person copied on the correspondence that matters, and a habit of the owner taking their scheduled leave so that the gaps are discovered while everyone is well.

Deciding what actually drops

The decision that most often goes badly is the implicit one. Nobody says which work will not happen, so everyone tries to do everything at a lower standard and the shortfall appears everywhere at once. An explicit list, made on the first morning, of what continues and what stops is worth more than any amount of goodwill.

That list is a management task rather than a peer one. Where it is left to the team, the person with the least ability to refuse ends up absorbing the work, and the same person absorbs it every time. Small teams often only discover this pattern when that person leaves.

The final and least popular observation is that a team of four with no slack has decided, whether it says so or not, that nobody may be ill. That decision gets made in a budget meeting and paid for on a Monday morning several months later.