The Ethics of Down Time

In some of my earlier posts in this space I’ve already commented on the need to handle employee paid leave (vacation days, sick days, and paid holidays) fairly and even-handedly. It may seem incredible, at times, that anyone is still arguing the other side of this issue; leaving aside the legal, social and regulatory aspects of paid leave, even a purely pragmatic view should be sufficient to confirm that denying your workers time off with pay will result in lower productivity, poorer worker relations, and increases in such undesirably behavior as shirking and employee vandalism. But what happens when the people requesting time off don’t have a doctor’s note or a religious observance they need to perform? What if it’s just a matter of needing a couple of days off?

If your immediate reaction was to roll your eyes and mutter something about giving people inches and seeing them take miles, you’re not alone. Anyone who has ever managed a group of workers knows that there are always going to be people on the crew who are going to regard any benefit you offer as an attempt to squeeze anything extra they can get out of the company, just as there are always going to be those people who have to observe the Feast Day of Saint Monday (better known as calling in with a hangover) multiple times every month. But what about cases where somebody has put in three straight weeks of 80 or more hours trying to finish a project on time, or people who are not eligible for stress leave even though they’ve been through a rough experience on the job? What is a manager supposed to do in those cases?

The obvious answer in these cases is to use comp time if you have it, but many employers do not have a comp time program, and in many cases union agreements, offset shift arrangements, or remote supervision issues would make one impossible. It’s sometimes possible to give somebody a day (or even an afternoon) off in a purely informal sense; telling them to go home and marking their time card as present, or clocking out for them, or whatever, but this brings up the problems of other members of the work group resenting this “special” treatment and the fact that this tactic is technically perjury (falsifying in-house attendance documents). And if the person receiving this special consideration is perceived as the office brown-nose (if the other members of the work group believe that you are arranging your assignments so that workers you particularly like get to have more time than everyone else) the overall effect on the group is likely to be even worse than just offering your stressed-out worker a few hours off the books…

Of course, the best solution would be to distribute the assignments so that no one is pulling significantly more work than anyone else while building the team up to the point that when someone who reports to you is experiencing a serious problem, the other members of the work group will suggest that you give the affected teammate the day off even before you think of it. Backing this up with either a comp time program or a discretionary budget (something that allows you to do overtime pay or special merit rewards for off-the-clock work hours) that you spread around evenly would be even better. But the situation is still going to come up every so often when you have the choice between doing what’s best for your employees, and following the company’s attendance (and compensation) policies. When that happens, what will you choose?

It’s worth thinking about…