Tuesday · 19 May 2020

Rest days and the shape of recovery

Posted by Call In Sick Tips Revealed · Filed under Rest and Wellbeing · Permalink

Recovery is not linear, and almost every scheduling assumption in working life pretends that it is. A person is off, then a day arrives, and they are back. The underlying process rarely obliges with such a clean edge.

Ordinary short illness tends to have a long tail. The acute part ends and is followed by a stretch in which a person is technically fit and measurably slower. This is unremarkable and well understood in general terms, but it is invisible to a system that records only presence and absence, and so it becomes an unrecorded cost that lands on the returning person and on the colleagues checking their work.

The false economy of the early return

Coming back a day early is attractive because the saving is immediate and the cost is deferred. The saving is one day of cover. The cost is spread thinly across a week of degraded output and, in the case of anything infectious, potentially across other people's absence as well. Because the two appear in different places, the trade rarely gets evaluated honestly.

Organisations that have looked at this seriously usually end up doing the same unglamorous thing: they make the first day back a lighter day by design rather than by request. No meetings before mid-morning, no deadline landing on the return date, an explicit expectation that the first task is reading rather than producing.

Rest that is not sleep

The word rest is doing a lot of work in most absence policies and it is usually read as sleep. Sleep matters and is not the whole of it. Recovery from anything that involved sustained concentration or worry also requires a period without decisions, which a day at home spent monitoring email does not provide.

This is the practical argument for absence being genuinely absent. A half-monitored day is neither cover for the team nor recovery for the person; it produces the appearance of both and the substance of neither. The teams that handle absence best tend to be blunt about it: while you are off, you are off, and somebody else holds the pager.

None of this is medical advice and it varies enormously between people and conditions. But as a scheduling principle it is sound, and it costs an organisation very little to build a slope into the return rather than a step.