Spring Break Series: A Better Approach to Sick Time

First of all, did ya’ll know there is a Spotify playlist called “Happy Classical in the Morning”? Well, you do now! I was supposed to be sitting at this laptop 28 minutes ago. Alas, alack, my ability to putter around my house is unmatched. This morning, I did the critical work of moving around plants and books ;)

Welcome back to this Spring Break Series – a vignette inside of my year-long essay project to dive all the way into the challenges and alternatives to America’s anemic approach to paid time off. Last week I outlined paid time off from a meta perspective. Go back and give that a quick read if you haven’t already.

This week I’m zooming in on sick time. Next week will be about holidays. The following two will cover vacation and bereavement leave, respectively. I hope you’ll stick with me throughout this whole series! Paid time off is one of the pain-points my clients highlight repeatedly. We can break through them with emerging alternatives that are viable, and more values aligned.

In an interesting break to my pattern thus far, I actually started this essay last week. I was looking ahead at the end of last week and noticed that my Monday (when I typically write these) appeared full: 3 client meetings + a mammogram (ugh).

This week is about sick time. And I wrote a bunch of paragraphs, but as I’m coming back to it now the whole thing feels dumb. Why? Because this topic feels dumb.

I am increasingly afraid that I simply sound treasonous pointing out from one week to the next how strange and illogical America’s approach to work is.

Yesterday I laid butcher paper out across my dining room table and grabbed the pack of multi-colored pens I got from my friend Dana for my birthday. I tried to sketch out what I’ve been thinking and how I’ve been feeling about this essay project to date. Essay #16 of 52 means I’m just about 1/3 of the way through the project. I ended up with three buckets to my brainstorm:

1) My original goals for this project

2) What I’ve learned, noticed, experienced thus far, and

3) My favorite parts + the itchiest parts (which felt more evocative, and frankly apt then “my least favorite” parts.

Here is what I’d like to try this week:

o I’m going to be super open about why I’m sharing precisely what I’m sharing. Sort of a behind- the-scenes, Director’s Cut version.

o I’d like to focus on the actionable take-aways so you feel as though you have a clear “what I can try next” to apply to your work (and life).

Please let me know how this lands for you after you give it a read (or listen). I want to be of service. I also want to practice moving away from the formal way a white female executive in her 40s is “supposed” to talk to whatever prose functionally moves the movement for equity and justice. I care less about whether my approach is “appropriate” to is my approach effective.

Jesus – that was a digression. Thanks for hanging in there with me.

Back to sick time.

Here is why this whole thing feels so friggin stupid to me. It took a global pandemic to remind us what we initially learned in kindergarten:

IF YOU’RE SICK, STAY HOME!

Truly, our resistance to logic, as adults who function inside a capitalist economy has really been something special. Our egos demand of us that we pretend to be impervious to the human condition. Rather than embrace our body’s wisdom, we try to override it with our big brains and “push through” as though that is ever gonna have positive consequences on the other side.

[Wait, wait, wait! An aria just came on this music mix from an album called “The Forgotten Saxophone.” I’m shook].

This week’s WHY:

Deepened cultural self-awareness  investigating our patterns of thinking and behavior – is the key to break us free from sleepwalking. When we are doing things that don’t make sense, like: paying women less, discriminating against POC job applicants, and coming to work sick, it is worth it to take some time to figure out what the hell is happening so that we can eventually chart a new, better, and more equitable path.

In the past seven years I have closely read more than 100 organization’s internal policies. This includes their relationship and rules to Paid Time Off.

Here’s my analysis of what’s going on with our warped tradition of coming to work sick in America: it’s cultural, it’s economic, it’s disembodied.

 Our Cultural Pattern - We have ourselves twisted in knots about missing days of work leading to the end of the world. Sounds like hyperbole, doesn’t it? Until you drill down into how we are working with very little margin, and therefore, are woefully unpracticed at waiting, pausing, pivoting, and/or trusting that our colleagues are our interdependent teammates who can surely tend to something pressing in our absence. We fear that if we are not illustrating our unique value from one moment to the next, we might lose our jobs – literally. The proverbial chopping block is always looming and we feel on a knife’s edge.

 Our Economic Pattern – Our “time is money” adage misses the point entirely. Taking the time we need to rest and recover from illness actually means less lost money overall. But we obsess over the short term (you were gone on Tuesday!) ignoring the overall impact of the long-term (because you kept working while sick, you took way longer to ultimately recover and you also took down other employees with you).

Many of us raised or coming of age in the U.S. were taught to chase the proverbial “perfect attendance” trophy. Remember that 90’s show “Head of the Class”? To this day, I distinctly recall the episode where one student was so hell bent on perfect attendance he came to school sick, and the other pupils started dropping like flies. The culmination of the episode was that even the teacher eventually got sick so the only remaining sniffing and sneezing student was now in a classroom alone with a substitute teacher – but at least got his attendance certificate!

 Our Disembodied Pattern – Many of us relate to our bodies as being sometimes “in the way” of what our brains are trying to accomplish. In the U.S. workplace we act in woefully ignorant ways to the very predictable realities we face as human beings coming to work. Bodies get sick. Bodies experience disabilities. Bodies give us signals (mentally, emotionally, or physically) of when we must take a break – it’s not an option, it’s a limit.

The U.S.’s Darwinian, Hunger Games like, “only the strong survive” nonsense is steeped in an obsession with a totally unrealistic comic book type masculinity. “Real men don’t cry. Real men don’t hurt. Real men don’t need to take days off.” Because of this super unhealthy trope, we have been held (and we hold ourselves) to a totally unreasonable standard - conflating sickness with weakness.

Okay, so now we’ve uncovered the patterns that have gotten us into this mess. How do we get out of it?

Alternatives + a Call to Action:

Start from a place that is grounded in this truth: COMING TO WORK SICK IS BAD FOR ALL INVOLVED –BOTH EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYEES.

It is totally predictable that a human workforce will need unplanned sick days from time to time.

In 2024 and beyond, your benefits package, including your approach to Paid Time Off can make or break whether or not top talent is willing to work for you. Workers are scouring through benefits packages like never before. Flexibility, trust, sharing values and more – all these things are important to workers that are not at all interested in being treated like cogs in a wheel.

With 5 minutes of deep thought, it becomes clear that coming to work sick actually hurts the bottom line more than it helps it. Doing what is actually required to get well (which can include seeing a doctor, taking time to rest, etc.) and choosing not to spread illness to your colleagues means that you are more likely to get back to fighting shape sooner and without taking anyone down with you as collateral damage.

A note about working from home vs. in the office when it comes to sick time: This is not just about mitigating the impacts of a contagion, it’s that when you are not well enough to be working, your job is to rest up and get better. Being useless in a meeting, making mistakes in a spreadsheet, and trying to “power through” when you are simply unable to concentrate – none of these things get you closer to mission. Being a member of the “walking wounded” is not impressive, it’s sad.

We can all do our part in divesting from old ideas of “company loyalty” or a “strong work ethic” wrongly associated with working while sick. In today’s workforce, being self-aware enough to acknowledge when you’re sick and to do something about it is a signifier of leadership qualities. Sickness isn’t weakness. It’s a temporary set-back that happens to living things. If we treat sickness like a shock or a betrayal to our company, we are simply refusing to behave like reasonable adults who all live in bodies.

Financially, when we operate with no margin, we run the risk of one set back creating an outsized negative impact. Folks’ schedules and task lists are so packed that missing one meeting or being out for a handful of days fully stalls an important project. It doesn’t need to be like that.

On interdependent staff teams, it is absolutely possible to make sure that more than one person is read in on important details and decision-making criteria. That way, if and when someone needs to be away from work, you can do a reasonably quick hand off so things can keep moving and/or due dates and deadlines can be adjusted so that the needed expertise is in the room.

We can and should do better – taking what we’ve learned and applying it to a future where we have both a better plan and more humane approach to staff dealing with illness.

Final Notes/Offerings/Ideas/Alternatives:

o Detail, disclosure, and confidentiality – have a plan for communicating who needs to know what and when. Not all details of an illness or absence are for everybody.

o Equity (and how not to keep score) -

 Do not make people perform sickness - don’t assume you know how someone feels based on how they look and sound to you.

 Stay conscious of culturally programmed ableism - treating people with needs different than our own as though they are less strong, reliable, and thus less valuable is problematic.

 Workers (especially women) regularly feel forced to use their own sick days to engage in necessary caregiving for community or familial loved ones. Workers have been communicating that there simply were not enough sick days allocated to cover the reality of getting through a whole year. My recommendation for years has been to STOP differentiating between different kinds of time off. There is no need to have “sick time,” “vacation time,” “holiday time,” as separate things. I’m happy to talk you through this if you’re interested in making a change at your org.

 You can foster a workplace culture of teamwork and willingness to support one another. You can proactively set up systems to clearly communicate how you want to prepare for and better execute on workplace absences which stem from either surprise days off or chronic conditions that require support.

Lastly, temporary illness can be different than a longer term and/or permanent disability. There is a combination of state and federal sponsored leaves and supplements for people experiencing disabilities. When a health challenge is or isn’t meeting the U.S. legal definition of disability, employers can partner with their employee to be creative problem solvers in order to figure out what combination of benefits will help most.

If you found this useful, please share it with people in your network! I’d love for us to start a sick leave revolution together!

Next week I’ll share thoughts about Holidays, followed by Vacation and Bereavement leave. Between now and then I highly recommend you do some of your own reflection on your relationship to rest – to time off – to “productivity” in general. Once we understand where our own excitement and resistance are coming from, we can open up to new ideas that might serve ourselves and our communities much better.

As always, you are welcome to reach out (trina@trinaolson.com) if you’d like coaching and support around putting better PTO policies into practice. I’d be happy to share what I’ve learned!

Yours,