Thursday · 9 January 2020

Seasonal illness and the office calendar

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

Absence is not evenly distributed through the year, and any organisation with a few years of records can see its own shape. Winter respiratory illness produces a broad seasonal rise; a single contagious episode in one department produces a sharp local spike; and school holidays move caring absence around in a pattern that has nothing to do with anybody's health.

Because these have different shapes they need different responses, and most absence policies apply one response to all of them. A trigger point that is reasonable in June is close to punitive in February, when a normally healthy person may collect two unrelated short absences without anything unusual having happened.

The office as a transmission network

The awkward truth about shared workplaces is that they are efficient at circulating whatever is going round. Meeting rooms, shared keyboards, and a culture of attending while marginally unwell together turn one person's absence into four. This is the clearest case where an individual's decision to come in is not an individual matter at all.

What follows from that is unglamorous: hand-washing facilities that are actually convenient, a genuine ability to attend meetings without being in the room, and a stated expectation that people with an obviously transmissible illness stay away. None of it is novel, and most workplaces observe it seriously for about six weeks after an outbreak.

Planning rather than reacting

Because the seasonal pattern is broadly predictable, it can be planned for. Deadlines that could fall in either month should not fall in the peak. Cover arrangements should be written down before the season rather than assembled during it. And absence reviews that compare a person against an annual average should compare like with like, or they will find a problem every winter and lose it every summer.

Planning of this kind is not a health measure and does not pretend to be one. It is scheduling. But it removes a large amount of the pressure that pushes people into working while contagious, which is the only intervention in this area that reliably reduces the total number of days lost.