If you are going to be sick for three days prepare for a major hassle.
So where I work they have a policy that if you are out sick for three days or more you have to call a phone number, have a note from a doctor, have your manager fill out forms, etcetera.
Am I the only one that finds a policy like this absurd?
I asked once why they had this policy. I was told it was to make sure that people weren’t coming back to work when they shouldn’t be.
Ok, I see two problems with this. First, because it is such a hassle a lot of people come back to work for at least partial days even though they are still sick and contagious. Their complex process completely defeats the stated purpose of the process. Second, if you don’t follow the process exactly, they punish you by taking away your vacation days for anything over the first two days. Thus no matter how sick you were, if you can’t find how to navigate through their process you will be penalized.
This seems to me like a sure way to make sure that sick people come back to work well before they should. In fact, I have heard management tell people to come in for a half day so that they don’t have to deal with this process as it is a hassle for them as well.
It would be one thing if the information on this policy was easy to find. The thing is, nobody in my office even knows who our Human Resources (HR) contact is let alone how to call with questions. The Intranet is no help as there is no menu item that mentions HR or anything to do with sick leave. The only thing we have is the generic emails that blast out to the company which usually get immediately deleted because we don’t have time to deal with their latest morale boosting excersize since we are all overworked due to cut-backs.
One would think a Fortune 500 company would be able to come up with something better than this.