UK employers' attitude to sickness is Victorian & tired of office 'martyrs'

[Startingagainandagain]

Reflecting on this as we are in the flu season.

Why do so many people will go in the office when they are so obviously unwell and risk infecting everyone else?

Why do employers seem to think that if someone is off sick they are automatically fibbing?

I have had flu symptoms all week (awful muscle pains, headaches, sore throat, constant sneezing...). I have a long term health condition and have to be careful not to mix too many pain killers with my regular meds. So I had to stay home to recover and after 3 days of rest I still feel rotten. My employer seems to be pissed off that I dared taking som time off...

I have people in my team who 'perform' martyrdom on a constant basis when it comes to illness: someone who broke several bones insisting they were working from their hospital bed (which is impossible & unsafe considering how much pain meds they give you in this situation and how drowsy they make you...), another who also assured our manager they were working while sitting in A&E with their sick partner. We also have regular instances where someone comes in with covid or similar contagious disease and then causes the rest of the team to catch it and go off sick which is totally counterproductive...

Basically I am puzzled that employers seem to think that people should never get sick and that so many employees go along with the charade.

Would it not be more sensible and healthier to have a more pragmatic view to illness at work?

And don't get me started on disability: if like me you have a long term health condition/disabilty your card is marked as soon as you declare it on end up needed time off when you have a flare up.

Why is the UK workplace like this?

Am I being unreasonable to think there is a better way to deal with illness and disability at work?

This is a fair point. I suppose the poster meant in workplaces that have fair sickness policies, but those are steadily decreasing nowadays. It makes sense that many people have no choice but to work regardless.

All that I can see this culture causing is a society where immunocompromised people are completely left behind as we can’t physically just “muddle through” when unwell. Plus we’ll be picking up more viruses than others, never mind the additional time needed for our underlying medical conditions. The way that workplace attitudes towards absences have been going, fewer disabled people are going to hold onto jobs. There certainly is something very Dickensian about this.

Some employers are like this. Not all. Company I worked for (an American one as it happens) had a perfectly reasonable sickness policy.

Really? I'm not British and worked outside the UK for several years. Have been in London for 10ish yrs now and people take loads of time off 'sick' in comparison to other places I have worked.

HR uphold our sickness policy however, how you are treated is dependant on your line manager. I've had a run of line managers who if you are unwell you go off sick and they don't make you feel guilty. Now there is an expectation you WFH if you are too sick to come in because they do.

Prior to the pandemic there was one person who came in regardless of how sick she was and then spread it around. Every time we came in contact with her we'd be sick.

When I ran a team if you were sick you stayed off and I think my being flexible and supportive helped to have a brilliantly performing team.

But not all jobs are like this. Some people don't get full pay or any pay if they don't work. I'm convinced I caught gastroenteritis from retail staff a couple of years ago.

Thankfully, I don’t think I’ve ever worked anywhere with this culture. I did have a manager boast to me once that he’d not taken a sick day in 9 years. I said he was lucky to be so healthy but surely he realised comments like that aren’t very inclusive and as a manager I’d expect him to support employees who are unwell. Shortly after he had very nasty glandular fever and was off for weeks.

Yes, I work through as much sickness as possible, because there's some sickness I cannot. I missed two days last year because I was in critical care, for example, and couldn't get to a computer.

This is not my personality. This is because I have a chronic health condition and I catch a bug every 2 weeks! I can't take three days off out of ten, but I am definitely sick that often.

I have been punished repeatedly in my career because of this. I have never earned a bonus, because of this. I know that if I am to keep my job, I have to work when I am puking or coughing or running a fever. This is because I cannot work when I am in surgery or intensive care, and I have to buy grace for those days by overworking in crazy ways the rest of the time. So yes, I will work a 16 hour day to make up for low productivity the day before. Yes, I will work through Covid. I will, yes. I do these things. I wish I didn't have to but I'm not independently wealthy.

It drives me mad when people lay this on me. It's not me! It's the contract I am bound by, which I have read forensically.

I have people who need my wage. I need my job. If people think it's wrong of me to work through illness then they can pay my flippin bills.

How can you deal with people who take the mick? How do HR prove someone does not really have a migraine for example? If it was easy to enforce, they would have done so.

Oh for christs sake, she states she has a long term health condition, which likely will affect her if she is ill as well. So not a healthy adult.

You are just very lucky that nothing as yet has taken you down. In 35 years working I've had very little time off, except for the year that everything befell me.
Like a broken arm, followed by a lung infection, followed by a broken foot bone, followed by sciatica, followed by .... you get the idea.its just sheer bad luck sometimes. Fuck all vaccines can do when you break your leg right.

@Bodeganights same
This year I've been off with
Tonsillitis - can't work with no voice
Food poisoning- can't work through that
Endometriosis pain

That company was stupid for not having a fair policy and why wasn't wfh an option?

This is why I hate school attendance awards. Recently we've had a huge wave of Covid, strep/scarlet fever, plus a few other nasty bugs. I had to keep one DC off for over a week with Covid and a respiratory infection and school started getting really naggy about it - but what was the alternative, to send him in unwell, firstly making it take longer for him to recover, and secondly to pass it on and mean even more students would catch it and be off?

It's a lose/lose sometimes. With work it's worse with limited sick leave/pay.

My DH works in a control room. The air is circulated back through the room. Being ill is awful in those situations because when one is down, they all catch whatever illness they have. His company however is awful about illness due to previous employees taking the piss.
Excuses I've heard have ranged from "I don't have a lift into work", "my car has broken down", "my stomach feels a bit funny", "I can't stop sneezing", "I have a headache" etc. Because they monitor sensitive secure sites they can't work from home and just blow shifts when they feel like it, not a lot can be done and it builds resentment.
Then when people are genuinely unwell they end up coming in, feeling guilty and passing it on and then the control room ends up being full of ill men and women.

Got a boss that’s a bit of a “hero” with sickness…always claiming to never be ill, never had a sick day in xxx years blah blah.
Refused all Covid jabs and advice (Covid didn’t exist🙄) even though we mix with lots of the public every day.
He caught Covid quite badly… and STILL CAME IN TO WORK! He was very unwell, and looked like death but still hung around every damn day, causing to rest of us to get it😡 Then maintained he’d still “never had a day off sick”
We lost a lot of respect for him after that.

Tbh, if I’m unwell, I don’t go in. If you drop dead, you’re soon replaced and nobody at company level gives a crap about you in real terms. It’s not worth making yourself suffer, and spreadin* germs around others.

Thank goodness you put me straight that I can't live on air. I was just thinking that if I stepped outside and got a few good lungfuls I wouldn't have to cook tonight.

Of course this comes down to economics and I have bills to pay just like everyone else. However, given the choice of one employee staying home sick and none of their colleagues catching it and having to go off sick too, versus that one employee coming in and spreading their germs resulting in several people catching it and going off sick (plus the original person possibly having to go off sick too if their condition deteriorates through coming to work while too unwell), I know which scenario makes better economic sense to me. (I'm fairly sure you're going to say something like how about they all man up and work through it, but if it's more than just a cold then that's likely to be physically impossible.)

Slightly puzzled as to why you keep linking this to personality, though. You are literally the only person on this thread who's mentioned personality.

YANBU.

I used to work in an office where some of the managers liked to martyr themselves when they were sick & expected others to do the same. They’d be coughing and sneezing everywhere, hamming it up a bit. Most of us were thinking ‘just bugger off home’
Then of course, whatever lurgy it was, would whizz round the office & everyone would get it!

Yep, I caught covid earlier in the year by someone playing martyr, as did a few other people. I took a day off because I was exhausted and really ill with it. When I went back I was met with a sarcastic comment about how I was the only one that took sick for it 🙄

This. The fact is some people are awfully quick to take a sick day - eg taking 2-3 days off for a modest cold when actually with some otc medicines they'd have been fine to work. If thats happening once a year, fine, but we all know those cheeky feckers who already take 7,8 sick days a year and if given an inch would take a mile!

Well, I guess it depends on where you work?

I used to work in a contact centre environment - people were constantly calling out sick. It made it much much harder for the rest of us.

I still work for the same company but in a different role; as I'm basically in charge of my timetable, if I'm sick, I'm sick.

You might be healthy but you sure don't have any reading comprehension skills.

She literally says, in the post you quoted, 'I have a long term health condition'...

I agree with a PP who said this starts at school with attendance awards. When I worked in one particular school, staff who had 100% attendance were given a half day off for Christmas shopping the following year.
We were expected to come to work when ill. If we fell ill during the day, we would have to go and have our temperature taken at the office to see if we were ill enough to go home - just like the children!
Once a colleague was suddenly repeatedly physically sick on the way to work. She felt dizzy and had to pull over. She called in to say she couldn't drive and was too ill to come into work. She was asked to get a taxi in. She got a taxi home instead.

Where are you all working? I’ve always been subject to fairly reasonable sickness policies. If you are sick you stay home, most minor bugs are clear within a week and absence procedure only kicks in if you are off more than 8 days.

There are people who take the p!ss but the worst offenders are shown the door.

Aldo if you have something contagious you are encouraged to work from home.

People definitely aren’t working from hospital beds! They would be very firmly told otherwise and we would be getting IT to block their logins if that was the case!

Health is worth more than any amount of money.

Many employers think the benefits system is there to allow them to make a profit by only paying minimum wage so there is little sympathy with regards to sick pay.

Yanbu. And it starts in school. My 7 year old son was seriously ill in hospital for a week. Fortunately he made a full recovery. A few weeks after he got home we received a letter from his school telling us his attendance was unacceptable and needed to improve. This was the only time off he had!

It's exactly like this at my work too (care home).

People need to be more resilient. A runny nose and a sore throat are not reason enough to stay off work, and the more your immune system is exposed to different pathogens, the better it becomes at dealing with them.