What? No Netflix?
The sick day may well be a thing of the past for office workers and students alike.
My 13 year old daughter came downstairs this morning complaining of a headache and feeling sick. She has a solid 8 year track record of pulling sickies to avoid school only to make a recovery more miraculous than an Italian footballer so, as usual, we were well prepared. We did the responsible parenting thing by plying her with chemicals from the medicine cupboard. We berated her for the unnecessary sleepover on Saturday night with an unworldly 2am finish. We told her that she would feel so much better once she was in school. We then of course reverted to bribery, promising gifts of chocolate and money if she just toughed it out today. She resisted and eventually wore us down to making the apologetic call to the school.
In her defence I think that she really is feeling poorly. It's been 3 hours now and still no sign of her sitting in the living room with a nice cup of tea, a packet of chocolate biscuits glued to Netflix. This isn't anything that doesn't play out across the world every day so what made today different? Today was the first time I have ever uttered the words, 'well she'll have to go online and do her schoolwork remotely'. And then it dawned on me, the sick day is officially over, the blend of covid and technology has changed our thinking about what is possible when it comes to working through mild illness.
Back in the heady days of the 20teens a sick day was pretty black and white. Employee calls in sick at 9am, employer says goodbye and writes them off for at least a day with the hope that they will come back fit, well and motivated tomorrow. Nobody enjoyed that call. The employee would be wracked with guilt and nerves about how the boss would react and the manager would sit at the other end of the line wrestling with a mixture of faux sympathy and irritation while wondering exactly how sick young Billy really was. But it was generally finite. Once the call was over, Billy could stop putting on his most convincing sick voice and, with a sigh and a heavy heart the boss would start to make plans around how the team copes with a person down.
But now it's different. No more sprint to the couch or back to bed for a few hours because 'the sickie' has been replaced by 'working from home'. There is a new dilemma here because working from home sits somewhere in the middle of toughing it out in the office and being so ill that even WFH isn't an option. What WFH does is provide a happy middle ground for both parties. It may well be that the traditional 'touch of flu' would usually be enough to dissuade you from trudging through the snow to the packed bus or train full of equally virus ridden commuters and while you may not have been too sick to actually work, the thought of a day sitting in a lively, buzzy room with noisy, demanding colleagues would be enough to reach for the phone, best croak at the ready. WFH allows you to get on with the job in a more comfortable environment, an arms length away from the constant pressures of being visibly available in the office and will more than likely aid your recovery, not to mention stop you from spreading lurgies to fellow workers.
From an employees point of view this is the best case scenario. We know from recent experience that when we are truly on our game at home we are more productive and less distracted than when in the office while still being 'always on' (thanks Microsoft Teams for that). We tend to work longer hours at home, spending less time travelling to a building an hour or so away to do the same work that can be done in the kitchen.
So who loses out here? Not the employer, who very rarely has to cope with total absence, or the employee, who no longer has to feel guilty or worried about the consequences of being away from their work for a day or two. Perhaps somewhere in a London TV studio, Phil and Holly are wringing their hands as they ponder a sharp decline in viewing figures. Maybe Netflix have lost a handful of subscribers somewhere along the line? Or maybe it's my daughter, currently blissfully unaware that when she finally comes out of her room expecting to decamp to the sofa for the day, I will be on hand with laptop and schoolbooks to signal the official ending of the sickie - in this house anyway.