To wonder if boss was being unreasonable here?

[ArethaQ]

Yesterday I felt really unwell with a pounding head, just felt dreadful. It was meant to be my office day and I have a very long commute. I asked my boss with plenty of notice if I'd be able to work from home. The job doesn't require me to be in the office, I can do it on my laptop and I'm easily contactable throughout the day.
She is normally quite reasonable but she replied almost implying that I was taking advantage and that everybody would be doing the same if they could. I don't necessarily think that's true, some people prefer going into the office and feel isolated at home. She said that it should be classed as a sick day.
I ended up going in. I sort of see what she's saying but it's the first time I ever requested to work from home on an office day and I was still going to get the work done, there was no purpose for me to be in the office that day, I'm in a very junior role.

Well she's lost a day of your Labour then, up to her. Obviously you don't do any work if you're actually off sick.

I've never had a day off/sick day since I've been there. Maybe she'd just felt under pressure from higher management to apply policy.

Tricky. I assume she is normally a reasonable person so maybe she genuinely meant that if you felt too bad to travel you shouldn’t be working at all ( being honest would you have been slightly less productive than usual staying home). Also she might not have wanted to set a precedent that office days are optional. Only you know what she is like. Flex would have been nice obviously

Are you under contract to work a certain amount of days in the office each week? I can see where your boss is coming from, it sounds like she is trying to nip any piss taking around working from home in the bud, and her comment about if you were that ill it should have been a sick day was fair enough.

Yeah true.. I guess I'll know for future anyway.

I think this depends how regular an occurrence it is and more generally WFH is disguising what should be recorded as sickness absence and pushing people to work when they're really not well enough to.

Yeah it makes sense I guess, we're supposed to be in the office a couple of days per week but mainly work from home.

No she hasn't..?

It was the first time I'd ever asked. I can certainly see people asking due to childcare issues etc.

I would have said that’s ok, but come in and make up the office day another day this week or so an extra next week.

Yeah that's fair enough. Just interested to see how other business do it.

In future I would ask to work from home but come in a different day instead - so that its clear you aren't doing it just to save a day in the office.

I suspect she's judging you based on either experience with others - or her own behaviour...

My work would have just said 'that's fine, see you next week' as they don't see the point of coming in for the sake of it

Yeah, good idea re coming in on another day, then they can see you aren't taking the mick.

Where I work they'd be fine with it. In fact they don't want people in who might have germs to spread so anyone not feeling great, but well enough to work, will work from home. But then as a previous poster said, they don't see the point in coming in just for the sake of it either.

It's a job where it makes zero difference whether I do it at home or in the office, for my role the office days are just a formality.

I would have said it was fine & asked if you wanted a sick day or WFH. i would want you to stay home, not traipse about getting to work so you recover more quickly AND so you're not spreading it around.

presenteeism is alive & kicking

I think there's an increasing pushback against wfh. Somebody posted some recent studies in another thread and pretty much all of them showed home workers to be a fair bit less productive.

I'm thinking maybe people worked hard at first to prove it was viable but then slowly started slipping - longer breakfasts, more checking of social media, etc.

You could have asked to swap a WFH day with an office day so that you were in the office for the allocated time. I do get that if you’re unwell then you should be unwell enough to not work from the office or from home. However I have definitely had days where I’ve felt unwell but still been able to get on at home so I can see why you asked.

Yeah I can see what you mean, it's about fairness across the board and consistency I guess.

next time you are sick: call in sick and don't work.

Your company needs to treat you like a grown up. At mine we are fully hybrid anyway, and can choose when we will be in the office and when we will work from elsewhere.

I have been WFH for over a week because i started with the pounding head, went into a sore throat and headcold and is now horrible chesty cough. I was off sick for 2 days then wfh the rest because a) I'm exhausted and the commute takes it out of me and b) i don't want to infect the rest of the team.

And that is how it should be.

She is right that either you are sick or not.

But people need to be able to work out if they can do the same work from home if they feel headachey. If you can be trusted to work from home then you can be trusted to make the decision about which day to go into the office.

A good sleep at lunchtime might have cleared it. Which you can't do in the office.

I agree with pp that asking to swap your office day might have got a better reception; also mentioning that you don't want to infect others with whatever you have.

I think if I got an early morning message from one of my team saying us was too I'll to travel and could I work from home, my response would be "yes, sure, but if you're not well you should really take the day off sick".

My DH has been doing that for years with his work. If he has a slightly dodgy tummy or our DC had been sick in the night he'd just tell work he would be logging on from home and they've always been fine with it. This has been from way before COVID as well where he didn't WFH regularly. He works on IT for a large company.