The other day a woman came into our office to see the doctor, on her way out she noticed that we were a bit short-handed and wondered where the rest of the staff was. I explained that one person was taking a planned vacation day and the other called in ill. She then began to tell us that she worked on a custodial crew for a local school district and how hard it was when someone called in sick because the others on her crew had to not only do their jobs, but had to pick up the work of the person who was out, because all of the work needed to get done each evening no matter what. She went on to say there was one younger person on her work crew that had a habit of calling in sick on Monday and Fridays and this really irritated her because of the extra work it caused for the rest of them and there was no extra pay. When this person called in sick again, she decided to talk to him about how she felt and said "do you realize that you have called in for one reason or another missing work for about 2000 times in the past year?" (Now she knew she was exaggerating the number, but wanted to make a point) She then said "I think I am calling in sick this Friday because it is my birthday." He said "wow, it is your birthday, happy birthday." She explained that it really wasn’t her birthday but she just wanted to make a point about taking off work whenever you felt like it and calling in sick. He asked her why she was so upset because he called in sick every now and then. She told him it was because she and the rest of the crew have to pick up the 8 hours of work that he would be doing and split it among themselves to get it done, and they didn’t make anymore money, but were doing more work. Now this young man was just stunned and looked at her and said "why do you have to do my work?" She answered "who do you think is going to do it if you’re not here?" He answered "don’t they just called in a substitute to cover for me, like they do for the teachers?" Now it was her turn to be stunned, she could not believe he actually thought when he was absent from work it had no effect on his team! She explained to him how it worked, which was something that apparently no one ever had done before. She said the next evening when she came to work this young man was doing some of her duties and she asked him why he was doing it and his reply was "I am practicing to make sure I can do part of your job and mine to make sure I can do it whenever you might be gone." Wow, did what she tell him have an impact? She said not only did he practice that day, but he picked up part of her duties for several days saying he was practicing to make sure he could do all that was expected if she were not there. I think not only will he think twice before calling in sick, but I also take my hat off to his coworker who was fed up with the situation and decided to talk to her coworker about it. Amazingly enough he had no clue what effect his absence had on his teammates until she did. This is a great topic for a work meeting because we all need to realize what effect we have on our teammates when we are not there and talk about how the workload should be handled to avoid the possibility of someone thinking "oh they will just call in a substitute for me when I not there."
"You make a difference to your team when you are there and even more so when you are not" ~T.C. Totaro
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