To think that a Nursery chain should not incentivise staff attendance?

[PinkCanary]

Following on from a recent thread that highlighted the common school practice of awarding children attendance certificates I've just read an article about a cook in a nursery chain who has won £10000 for perfect work attendance for the last 4 years.

Now perhaps he didn't know that he was eligible and hasn't been ill in that time but should a nursery chain really be encouraging staff to come in when they're ill?

What do other people think?

my mum runs a care home for the elderly and they've just started doing this. It's because when staff are on relatively low pay they aren't always bothered about taking a lot of sick days or showing up for work.

The home (and the nursery I guess) have minimum staffing levels which means expensive agency staff at short notice.

Without an incentive scheme there's no way of rewarding people who work hard day in day out so its motivating for the employees. It mum's case it's based on a range of feedback and performance criteria.

They use a scoring model for sickness so lots of one day absences has a higher weighting than one long absence. Absence can also be discounted from the data if there's medical backup and not just self certifying. So genuine illness might not have excluded people. It's porbably not as black and white as 100% attendance.

Well imo yabu - i think having an incentive is a good thing - i work in a nursery and if staff are off sick YOU HAVE to cover them you cant just think "ah well the workload can wait till tomorrow" it cant your on a staff:child ratio - so if you have a staff member off all the time and there is nothing to encourage them not to then they may do it more - Some people will have a cold and cant move off the sofa and yet others will carry on -IMO you should carry on unless you physically cant and before anyone says " but thats how we all catch colds from people carrying on" if nobody went out when they had colds etc the whole of the uk would stop all winter!!