Tuesday · 17 March 2020

Remote work and the disappearing sick day

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

Working from home removes the most reliable signal a workplace ever had about illness: the empty chair. Everything that follows from that absence of evidence has been reshaping how sick leave works, and mostly not in the direction people expected.

The first effect is that the threshold for attending collapses. The journey was doing a lot of quiet gatekeeping. A person too unwell to face a commute may be perfectly capable of opening a laptop, and so a day that would once have been an absence becomes a slow, distracted, partly worked day that appears in no record at all.

Nobody can see the state you are in

The second effect is on the people around you. In a shared room, colleagues notice, send someone home, and adjust expectations without being asked. Remotely, none of that happens. A person can spend three days visibly online and invisibly unwell, and the first anyone learns of it is when the work does not arrive.

This puts an unusual weight on self-declaration. The only way anyone knows is if the person says so, which means the cost of saying so has to be kept low. Where remote teams have handled this well, it is usually because someone made a point of announcing their own absences plainly and briefly, establishing by example that a one-line message is sufficient and that no medical narrative is expected.

Half-days and the honest message

A genuinely useful development is the partial declaration: I am unwell, I will do the two things that cannot wait, I am not available for anything else. It is more accurate than either pole and it lets colleagues plan. It only works in a culture where nobody treats the two things as evidence that the rest of the day was available too.

The corresponding risk is that sick leave quietly ceases to exist as a category. If every absence becomes a reduced day, the organisation loses both the recovery and the record, and the pattern that would have shown up in an absence report shows up instead as a slow decline in output that gets attributed to the person's ability.

The practical answer is to keep the category explicit. A remote sick day should be declared, recorded and unstaffed exactly as an on-site one would be, and the absence of a chair to leave empty is not a reason to work through it.