If you’re off does your job get covered?

[WhatIsBooba]

After a conversation with DH we realised that when we are off (sick/holiday) from our jobs mostly aren’t covered and we come back to a back log.

Mine is covered a little bit more than DHs but I still come back to work that hasn’t been done, whereas his isn’t touched and he has to catch up on it all (he’s higher up the food chain than me though so maybe that is a factor?)

It just got me wondering is this the norm? What happens when your off?

I envy my DH. He has a fixed number of appointments each day, and there are no appointments when he's off, so no catching up.

I work in professional services consultancy. How much gets done when I'm off depends how much I've handed over to a colleague.... usually not much because they're busy too. Anything time critical gets left with someone, and anything else just gets delayed.

What other option is there? We're a paid-by-the-hour consultancy, we can't afford to have people sitting about doing nothing waiting to provide holiday cover, everyone has their own work, and the time needed to recruit & train & familiarise a temp in a technical field with ongoing projects would be longer than my holidays (even if we could find one - it's an employees' market just now, none of the companies in my field can recruit fast enough just now).

The most urgent tasks and queries are dealt with by a colleague. Everything else is waiting for me on my return.

The day before I return from leave, I spend several hours reading and categorising my emails. It stops me feeling overwhelmed and out of the loop on my first day back.

tobypercy
Your husband's role sounds fantastic. He basically picks up from where he left off - absolute bliss!

My role is pretty varied and I support a number of teams (sales, consultancy and finance) so yes someone covers the fundamentals. Anything that can be left for me though, is left.

Thankfully I work with a colleague whom knows my role well (and vice versa) so we cover each other quite seamlessly. Unless we are both off rare but there will be times throughout the year we are both off and then things have to get routed through our US office so often one of us is back before anything is actioned

One element of my job is covered but the main part isn't. I have to do the prep work before I'm off. I've not actually been off unexpectedly since my role development into what it is now but if I was ill, I'm not sure anyone could cover for me. Thankfully it hasn't happened and unless I was in hospital, I'd do limited work from home.

Mine does, because if it didn't there would be a lot less people able to pick their shopping up on time or it being delivered on time.

@Isabellabasil Yes! I’m retired now but had covid mildly a couple of weeks ago and said to my husband if this wasn’t covid I’d be at school today. I used to dread being ill and having to call my head before 7.30am. I can still hear the silent groan she made as she calculated the cost of a supply teacher for my class of 30 infants. By lunchtime I’d get a call to check I was returning the next day.

Yes, almost everything.
I'm part of a small admin team so we can all do most of the work.

In my old job, it wasn't so much cover as opportunity cost.

Most of my workload had "cover", some of it would build up, but another chunk was opportunity generation and future-proofing. Hard to put a figure on lost opportunities as when they're gone, they're gone.

No, but I tend to cover it remotely if I see something urgent coming in, I have my work emails come through on my work phone.

If I was off unexpectedly for a prolonged period my boss would cover it.