Covid lateral tests and symptoms

briskbeats

Filo25 said:

Sea_Shell said:

I wonder for how long we'll have to carry on self isolating and testing with "symptoms".   

When can we again suffer with a cough or temparature and "soldier on"?

Will workplaces continue to accept this as a reason for being off sick, long term, and when (if) will the government's messaging change?

1 year, 2, 5, ever?

(I say "we" meaning as a nation, not personally, as I don't work!)

I actually welcome this if it is a permanent change as I can do my job perfectly acceptably from home!

Always got annoyed by presenteeism from people bringing infectious diseases into the office when they could just as easily have worked from home.

Obviously a lot tougher if you aren't able to work remotely.

Presenteeism was brought on by employers - with many using the 3 periods of sickness in a rolling year and disciplinary action. Employees are scared of disciplinary. Employers have brought in this policy as to prevent employees pulling random sickies. I have been down this route myself and its horrible. Plus with my employer scrapping verbal warnings 2 years ago, the first disciplinary caution is 1st written and that lasts a year!

Then one problem with this is an employee could have 3 years of no sick days - then in a space of 9 months - could have three. They still go down the same disciplinary route. Those three years with no sickness doesn't count, help them at all.

Think employers need to think twice with sickness policies, esp with employees working with the public. As now, some idiots think all coughs are all covid. No they are not. I had a chest infection and a throaty cough. I'm asthmatic that has an asthmatic cough, Also having hay fever triggers coughing. 

MattMattMattUK

briskbeats said:

Think employers need to think twice with sickness policies, esp with employees working with the public.

To an extent I agree, although you are looking at it from the position of a reasonable employee, whilst many of us will have had to deal with unreasonable employees over the years. I now run my own business and all my employees are great, they could work from home a few days a week pre-Covid and if someone had a cold unless there was a need I would rather that they work from home so they do not inflict it on others.

However in the past I have also had to manage people who took excess sick days, used to use sick days as an extension of annual leave etc. At one employer I ran a statistical analysis on sick days, for people who had more than five sick days in a year 72% of those sick days were on a Monday or a Friday, sick days occurred at three times the rate during school holidays than during school terms. For people who took five or more sick days a year their sick days increased dramatically once they had five or fewer days of annual leave left, after using all their annual leave up they accrued sick days at the same rate that they had previously used annual leave. For clarity I excluded those with long term medical conditions and those with fewer than five days annual leave, as a company I had managed to get the board to approve a policy where all medical appointments were not required as annual leave or counted sickness. There have been at every company I worked at until I have run my own, a group of 10-20% of employees who continually abused the sickness systems for their own benefit. The reason that companies need policies and have to enforce them is because a small minority continually try to take liberties. 

epm-84

MattMattMattUK said:

briskbeats said:

Think employers need to think twice with sickness policies, esp with employees working with the public.

However in the past I have also had to manage people who took excess sick days, used to use sick days as an extension of annual leave etc. 

There will occasionally be employees who are 'sick' because they had too much to drink on their last day of annual leave or because they are tired after they arrived back from holiday on a delayed flight which didn't get back until 3am and they didn't think to book a day off between getting back and getting back to work.  However, there's been two occasions where I've genuinely been sick which may have looked suspicious:
1. A few days after a work Christmas Party I came down with flu and was too ill to return to work between the first day I was sick and the 3 days I had already booked off work pre-Christmas.
2. One day an awkward line manager decided to have a go at me for doing something in a way he didn't agree with, even though it was a valid way of doing it and I hadn't been instructed to do a specific way.  I'd already been very stressed and the next day I found I had a headache, chest pains and hardly any energy so was too ill to go in to work.  However, it could easily have looked like I was pretending to be sick to get back at the awkward manager.  In my case though I had been with the employer for a number of years, had some complete years without taking a single sick day and had taken off very little time following a bereavement, so I had built up a reputation of not taking days off I'm not entitled to.

silvercar

I’ve been in an organisation where people would ask how many days sick leave they had to use up before the end of the year. This tied in with the company’s policy of the first X days of sick leave in a year didn’t count for any “bad marks”, so people were making sure they took their full allocation!

MattMattMattUK

silvercar said:

I’ve been in an organisation where people would ask how many days sick leave they had to use up before the end of the year. This tied in with the company’s policy of the first X days of sick leave in a year didn’t count for any “bad marks”, so people were making sure they took their full allocation!

Was it heavily unionised by any chance?

briskbeats

MMM

Very difficult for retail workers that work in shops to work from home.

My employer doesn’t count operations as sickness as that surgery could reduce or stop entirely the times they had been off sick. Or able to do more tasks and employee can go back to original hours. One colleague reduced her hours a couple of months before surgery as struggling. Within a month of going back to work, she was back to her original hours

GTR_King

I feel it should be for example if your ill (Not Covid-19) you should stay at home but if your asked to come in and feeling well Enough to come into work you should wear a Facemask at all times (Except for when your eating/drinking) till your 100% better e.g got rid of your cold/Bug etc that way you won't spread it to everyone else at work, and you won't be off sick, 

Where I work we only get Statutory Sick pay,  

p3ncilsharpener

GTR_King said:

I feel it should be for example if your ill (Not Covid-19) you should stay at home but if your asked to come in and feeling well Enough to come into work you should wear a Facemask at all times (Except for when your eating/drinking) till your 100% better e.g got rid of your cold/Bug etc that way you won't spread it to everyone else at work, and you won't be off sick, 

Where I work we only get Statutory Sick pay,  

Unless you work somewhere like a call centre where you'd probably be practically inaudible to the caller, or a shop or other customer-facing role where you are effectively advertising you've got a contagious disease which will undoubtedly put a lot of customers off.  Not to mention that masks don't really do that much to stop the spread (not the ones most people wear anyway.)

And of course people with colds and flu will often have runny noses, gonna be fun having your mask get more and more soaked with snot through the course of the day.

TBagpuss

briskbeats said:

Presenteeism was brought on by employers - with many using the 3 periods of sickness in a rolling year and disciplinary action. Employees are scared of disciplinary. Employers have brought in this policy as to prevent employees pulling random sickies. I have been down this route myself and its horrible. Plus with my employer scrapping verbal warnings 2 years ago, the first disciplinary caution is 1st written and that lasts a year!

Then one problem with this is an employee could have 3 years of no sick days - then in a space of 9 months - could have three. They still go down the same disciplinary route. Those three years with no sickness doesn't count, help them at all.

Think employers need to think twice with sickness policies, esp with employees working with the public. As now, some idiots think all coughs are all covid. No they are not. I had a chest infection and a throaty cough. I'm asthmatic that has an asthmatic cough, Also having hay fever triggers coughing. 

I don't think this is entirely true. I think that one reason why employers have this kind of policy is to try to be fair and avoid discriminatation - there are benefits in employers being able to be flexible but I know it can be very difficult for an employer to deal with someone who is taking the micky if they don't have clear and consistent policies in place. 

Ideally, of course, there should be sufficient flexibility built in to the system to allow employer to use their discretion for someone who needs it, but again this can be difficult if the employer is trying to be fair to everyone.