Managers - more cold questions

I've only managed a small team, and they were all pretty dedicated and hard-working. When they phoned in sick (which happened rarely) my first thoughts were for them, and hoping they would get better soon, rather than being cross that they were out of the office.

I think if I had been managing slackers I would have been more suspicious and crosser, but as it was I knew they if they were at home it was because that's where they needed to be, whether for a day or so for a heavy cold, or longer for something more serious.

But did they come into work with colds Flowery Grouchy?

When I was a manager certain members in my team would phone in sick if they broke a nail, whereas others would struggle in hardly breathing. If you had 4 separate periods of sickness you then had to explain yourself to the Area Manager. Fair enough if you want to prevent people from pulling sickies, but I did voice strong objections about this procedure when one of my team had suffered 4 miscarriages in a year & was forced to explain why she was off work. All wrong in my opinion.

I'd expect them to offer to work from home if it was a minor cold - I could send work their way that could be done at home. With the group I've got at the moment, most of them I'd trust to be honest with me if it was too much for them to work at all.

Erm, light colds - yes. So i guess they were contagious and spreading germs, and I probably would have been pretty annoyed if every time anyone had the slightest sniffle they were off, so as not to spread it.

I'd like to say, btw, that I'm not condoning managers being hard on sickness. I do try to work from home if I have a cold and I would be happy for my staff to do the same. It's just one of those kind of juxtapositions, that on the one hand we have all this discussion about it being anti-social to go to work with a cold and on the other we have plenty of threads about work colleagues skiving off and not pulling their weight. Kind of hard to find a middle road sometimes.

I'm lucky to manage a team who are very rarely off sick, that said the company I work for has a very strict sickness policy, (which it's just taken further by introducing 3 unpaid 'waiting days' for sickness), so even those who are genuine have to have a sickness review when they reach a certain % / BI score.

So no, I wouldn't be upset / angry with them as I would be assured it was genuine. If I thought otherwise it would be a tougher back to work interview

We weren't allowed to work from home, they had a really strict policy about it. And you had to have a doctor's note for 1 day of sickness, none of this self-certifying malarky.

But from a management point of view, I think it's about balancing - will whatever lurgy it is spread amongst the rest of the team, how much will it affect work, how long for. Some bugs are reasonably easy to work through, and are just annoying and distracting. Some really affect your capacity to work (in some jobs anyway). will struggling on just prolong the agony? will staying at home help you recover quicker? so many different variables it's hard to give a flat answer.

I would rather people stay off work in the first few days of a cold starting than try and drag themselves in. But there are a few who feel that they need to take the whole week off. I think 2/3 days is enough personally.

I was never allowed to stay off when I had the cold, this would have been when I was at school/uni. My mum said its only a cold so you're not really sick.

Only if I was flu-like (you know vomiting etc etc) then I got to stay off.

Then I got a job as cabin crew and it was drilled into us not to come in if we have a cold as it could damage our ear drums and be quite dangerous in that respect.

Now I work in an office, I manage the new recruits for their 5 week training and 'grad bay process'. My hands are tied by company policy on the sickness procedure (3 periods of absence in 12 months = a meeting with HR and possilbe dismissal if they don't believe your reasons) but still I am amazed by the number of people who are absent within the first month. Some people you just know are taking the pi$$ and as expected don't make it past 6 months before being dismissed, others you feel really sorry for as you know they're genuinely ill.

I never generally take time off work (except the last 3 weeks) but generally, I just don't do sick no matter what the reason.

If my cashier phones in and they don't feel well, that is fair enough. I am lucky, my cashiers are normally reliable. If they phoned in and they could have worked then I would probably be having a word with them.

As a manager, I was sympathetic to people being ill. Generally the staff I worked with were very good, in fact there were a few who I had to tell to go home as they should have been at home being sick instead of being in at work.

But then I blamed the company policy of their 'bonus' system. Basically those on administration wages were also given an attendance bonus, under the assumption that they would be more likely to take sickies so if you had full attendance every month you got an addition 10% on your salary but it did mean that they'd also come in sick as they didn't want to lose it or get it reduced as every day off they would lose a % until 5 days when they lost the full 10%. To me, as you get paid to go to work anyway so why give an 'attendance bonus' why not just up the basic salary.

I actually had a situation last christmas where I was made to feel guilty for being ill...my crime was that I was unfortunately ill at the exact same time as I had been ill the year before, the days between christmas and new year. And whilst I admit, to anyone who doesn't know me it would have looked suspect but at the time I was made to feel as if I'd bunked off like a naughty school girl and I was made to account for my whole sickness record in my 4 years of working there....to me it wasn't handled by my manager very well and in fact it created a large amount of issues between us, and probably contributed to why I decided to leave this year. Although this was partly brought around by the department being made aware of someone else taking the p!$$ (being seen in a club at 4am and then calling in sick the next day etc) but it was me who paid the price.

I don't to illness generally. I'm a very "positive mental attitude" kind of person when it comes to bugs etc. I don't let them bother me or stop me working etc and generally they don't take hold.

I work as a Area Sales Manager, so i'm out meeting customers during my working day. If it's just a sniffle then it's not to bad, but if I'm hacking my lungs up or visably ill, then a level of professionalism needs to come into play. I have the option of working from home on those rare occaisions, but I rarely take time off ill.

Until last week... I had the beginnings of a cold since the start of December, but workied through it. By the weekend I was in bits. Come Monday morning there was no way I could do anything, let alone talk to customers. I rang in sick. Company policy state that we ring in everyday within one hour of our starting time. I didn't actually ring into the office again until Thursday evening.

I returned to work this week, still not 100% but well enough to work. I've had to be in the office to do admin, but not once has anyone said anything. My manager hasn't comented on me not calling in everyday. I've not had a return to work interview. I am not surprised that so many people in this place skive off work so often. Quite simply they get away with it. No one asks difficult questions. In fact, it's made easy for them.