Has hybrid working made it harder to take time off sick?

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: Has hybrid working made it harder to take time off sick?

Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It with me, Isabel Berwick.

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Isabel Berwick
Remote working has made it much easier for us to power through illness rather than rest, and that can have disastrous effects on our health and wellbeing. So today on Working It, we’re asking whether remote working has made it harder for us to take sick days, and the statistics seem to support that idea. During the pandemic, the UK’s Office for National Statistics reported a record low in the number of days people were absent from work. It dropped from 3.1 per cent of working hours lost due to sickness in 1995 to 1.8 per cent in 2020. Now, some of that drop is perhaps because we just weren’t together very much so illness wasn’t passed about during the pandemic at usual levels. But the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development — that’s a UK trade body for HR professionals — ran a survey, and it showed that eight out of 10 of the participants reported that they knew people who had worked when ill. And that doesn’t surprise me at all. So, joining me to discuss and debate this are my FT colleagues Brooke Masters and Emma Jacobs.

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And Emma, I wanted to start with you because you wrote an article called “The end of sick days”, and that’s one of the most read articles we’ve published in Work & Careers in the FT this year. What are your initial thoughts about sick leave? And I wanted to bring Brooke in after you talk Emma because you’ve both had Covid, and I wanted to know what you did. Did you both work through? So, Emma, what are your initial thoughts about sick leave from researching the article?

Emma Jacobs
Well, I started looking into it because I realised that lots of people around me were working through sickness, and we did a big piece on coming back to the office where we solicited readers’ comments and loads of them were working through sickness. And they tended to be white-collar workers. I think it’s more difficult or more clear cut when people are have to be in the shops or hospitals. So then people are more likely to take time off if they get paid sick leave.

Isabel Berwick
And I believe you both worked through Covid. Brooke, can you tell me about that?

Brooke Masters
I did, actually. I had a relatively serious version. Also, I had a very high temperature — 102 for those of you who do Fahrenheit. And I thought, oh, I’ll still write my column, which turns out to be a really stupid idea because your brain just doesn’t function, and I ended up in tears at my laptop thinking, you know, “I can’t write any more”. If I had been ill in the normal world, I would have immediately assumed I couldn’t write, gone to bed and stayed there. I mean, I will say, on the other hand, I also, in this period, have sprained my ankle, and there working from home was brilliant because, you know, with a sprained ankle, your head still works and you’re bored as heck. So I really enjoyed working from home at that point, and that would not have been possible either in the original world.

Emma Jacobs
Yeah, I mean, I got Covid towards the end of the sort of staying-at-home period, so we were locked up. All my family got Covid at the same time and Isabelle’s my line manager, so I should say she didn’t force me to work during Covid, but I just kept thinking of what else am I going to do? I mean, the truth was I could have just watched TV, which is one of my favourite hobbies anyway, and I don’t know why I did it, but I just kept thinking, well, part of the reason that I did it, and this is what I’ve heard from lots of readers, is because I kept thinking about what was coming back to and all the kind of stories that were stacking up. And it wasn’t that I couldn’t have made an arrangement to push them back or not do so many. But organising that was a headache, and I think people are worried about backlogs.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, I think that’s an important one. And I wanted to talk about some of the reasons that the readers think that sick leave days are going down. And Emma, there were loads of comments on your article. Do you want to read one of the ones which I think is interesting about an idea that sick days are reducing because people are no longer pretending to be sick.

Emma Jacobs
Somebody’s written, “flexible working mostly eliminated sick days from me years ago. No one is calling you all croaky voiced on Monday about their sore knee or bad stomach when they can just work from home. From then on, you knew people were really sick.”

Isabel Berwick
And Brooke, I wanted to come to you. The idea of the fraudulent sick day is a persistent one with managers. And there’s an interesting comment here. I don’t know if you want to read that one out.

Brooke Masters
Sure. I was struck by this some. It said, “with work from home, I’ve started to work on days when I’m feeling ill but still able to type and then taking sick days when I fancy doing something cool, like taking the kids to an empty theme park on teacher training day. Everyone’s a winner.” I have to confess, I really don’t like that. I mean, I used to be a manager.

Isabel Berwick
Oh, yes.

Brooke Masters
I would much rather have them say to me, like, “I really need to take the kids out for a break”. Don’t work when you’re only three-quarters functional. Like be honest about this.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. And also don’t post on Facebook about your day out when you’ve taken a sick day from work, which was what one other colleague of mine did some time ago (laughter).

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Emma Jacobs
I have to say that I do regret working through Covid, not because I was particularly bad. You know, I didn’t have it as bad as Brooke, but just because I was making so many basic mistakes that it was a real pain to then go back to it, and it actually taught me just take clear time off.

Isabel Berwick
Do you think there’s any peer pressure on people to take time? I suppose it depends. I mean, there are workplaces aren’t there, where people are told just to work through Covid?

Emma Jacobs
So in the article I spoke to a teacher and I mean, teaching is one of those professions that used to be if you couldn’t do it in person, then you just couldn’t do it. But now, because of school closures, teachers have become much more flexible about virtual teaching. And so when she got Covid, she had to work and this was a really difficult environment where she had to work from home, teaching to quite disruptive pupils who had special needs. So she was supported by somebody in the classroom, by a teaching assistant, but she said it was kind of chaotic. And so this digital presenteeism has become something that companies have facilitated. I mean, flexible working has allowed lots of opportunities to work differently, but also that means that you’re working when you maybe shouldn’t be.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. And Brooke, do you think Covid has meant that we are less tolerant of people with minor illnesses?

Brooke Masters
I think some of both. I think there is an assumption that you will work through a minor illness, because honestly, if you don’t have to commute, surely you can work when you have to blow your nose a couple of times. On the other hand, I also think that Covid, because it is serious and can be serious and that’s recognised, when somebody says, “I have Covid”, I at least feel like with my team, if someone says, “I have Covid”, I’m like, OK, how sick are you? If you’ve got the bad kind, please don’t work because we know it can turn into something disastrous. So in a way, I think it kind of cuts both ways.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, it’s also quite distressing to watch a sickly colleague actually in bed with a sweaty face in Zoom calls.

Brooke Masters
Yeah, we’ve seen that.

Isabel Berwick
I think we’ve all seen that. I just think it’s unnecessary.

Emma Jacobs
A friend was saying that he had Covid and his . . . I think there’s a kind of fatigue that set in after two years, and he said that his boss just couldn’t be bothered any more with Covid, and he just wasn’t interested in any of his symptoms or anything. So he just insisted that he turned up to all the meetings virtually and is a lecturer actually, and was teaching virtually. And at one point he just said, you know what, I’m really sick. I’m going to have to take time off. But, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, he would have been given special treatment. But by the end of it, he was just like “too boring to talk about”.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, I think there was a fatigue generally, and I think there was something about productivity here that we need to delve into because is there an upside to some people working through minor illness? Brooke, do you think there could potentially actually be an upside?

Brooke Masters
I genuinely do think there is an upside when people are well enough to think. Particularly in white-collar jobs, there’s a big difference between the physical effort required to get to the office and whether you can think. And so if you can think, I think it’s actually quite good in that people can get the work done or work 2 hours and get the thing that really needs to get done. And that I think is really good for productivity. There is a downside, obviously, if people are genuinely really sick and trying to work through it, that cannot be good for productivity because people make mistakes, as Emma points out.

Isabel Berwick
Yes, exactly. But I think this point about you don’t need to do a full day’s work, maybe, but you can catch up a bit. So there’s a reader comment here that I like, which I think picks up on some of the things we’ve been talking about: “Something I noticed when moving from an office where most people drove to work to a central London office where everyone had a long commute by public transport was a much greater number of days people took off sick. This was pre-Covid. There were obviously many factors, but I realised that one of them was that you might feel well enough to do a day’s work, but not well enough to stand on a packed commuter train for an hour or more in each direction, which is where work from home is a big win for productivity.” So I guess this working when we’re not feeling amazing is an extension of flexible work really, although I’m not sure it’s one we should celebrate too much.

Emma Jacobs
The thing there is, I mean, as Brooke says, there’s a continuum of sickness, isn’t there? There’s kind of serious and minor, and one academic I spoke to said that sickness, it can be a bit like stress in that how we perceive stress now. A bit of stress is not terrible and actually can spur you on and a bit of illness like, if you’ve got a deadline, you can kind of power through. And I know that there’s a kind of the macho idea that I’m powering through some horrendous flu. But I think if done appropriately, it can help you focus and ignore your ailments and get on with it.

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Isabel Berwick
Do you think companies have a responsibility to encourage people to stop working, Brooke? Do you think managers have a role here?

Brooke Masters
Absolutely. I mean, I think you need to pay attention to who is functioning fine and who is clearly, you know, sweating it in the meeting and having trouble concentrating or saying stupid stuff that’s just irritating their colleagues. You know, just as in the pre-Covid days, you had a responsibility if you saw somebody like hacking away at their desk to send them home so they didn’t infect the rest of the staff.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah. It seems amazing now that we all used to slog into offices with really quite bad colds. I mean, I certainly did. I took a Lemsip and carried on.

Emma Jacobs
But I think also when the problem is remote managing and it is quite hard to detect when people are struggling, and especially for sort of mental health issues where you can’t observe changes in people’s behaviour so well, say, well, if they’re not next to you. And also there’s something about if you have been working remotely for a long time, that you might not have the sort of social bonds that you would have if you were in an office regularly. This isn’t me being on the side of Big Office, but it is something about, you know, people that work with you can be a social support and they can help you decide to take a day off or detect that you’re not up to par and that can be quite helpful.

Brooke Masters
I absolutely agree because, you know, I’m one of those people who gets really horrible hacking coughs. So I tend to ignore them because I always get them. And so when my co-workers would be like, wow, you sound truly dreadful, it would be the spirit of, Hey, oh, wait, maybe this cough has reached the point where I’m annoying to people around me. I should stay home and take care of myself.

Isabel Berwick
So to sum up, Emma, do you think sick days are always going to be less of a thing than they were before the pandemic? Or is this a blip?

Emma Jacobs
I think among white-collar workers, there’s much more of a continuum of sickness, I guess. And so maybe people will work bits and pieces throughout the day or come back to work a bit earlier if they can do work remotely. I mean, obviously people need paid sick leave so that they cannot go and work in shops or hospitals and pass sickness on. So I think white-collar work is different to blue-collar work, and for people to feel emboldened to be able to take time off if they’re working in a factory, they need to have financial stability.

Isabel Berwick
Right. And we’ve seen lots of new forms of sick leave coming in which fall under the banner of sick leave. Some of them are things like leave for menstrual pain, or leave if you’re having IVF treatment and are feeling unwell, or leave for menopause symptoms. I mean, this started before the pandemic, but it’s truly accelerated. Emma, do you think that’s because of the pandemic, or do you think that’s a sort of societal shift?

Emma Jacobs
I think it is a shift. I mean, when I talk to my son who is about to turn 10, he’s very aware of mental health in a way that possibly I’m not even now. You know, it’s something that they talk about at school. There’s much more appreciation of the way that it can affect people’s wellbeing. And in the workplace, that’s been a change that’s been going on for quite a long time, a decade or more. But I think that the pandemic has highlighted these broader definitions of wellbeing to include fertility treatments, menopause or mental health. When pandemic was at its worst, lots of companies were trying to deal with burnout and were coming up with kind of wellness days. And then LinkedIn and Bumble had wellness weeks, where people could just take time off to restore themselves. So I think there’s a much more fluid appreciation of people’s wellbeing and possibly a broader definition of it than there might’ve been before the pandemic.

Isabel Berwick
That’s interesting. Brooke, do you think it’s generational? I’m thinking particularly in the States where generational difference is often perceived as quite stark.

Brooke Masters
I do think there’s some generational element to it in that, certainly my daughter also, who is college age, is much more honest, like I can’t get out of bed because “I feel depressed”, as opposed to pretending in some way, you know, that “I’m hungover” or “I’m sick”. I do also think the other weird thing about sick days now is because people are more willing to be honest about why it is they can’t work, that in fact there will be less fake sick days where people will claim to have a cold when in fact they’re depressed. In fact, said they’re much more likely to say, “I’ve got cramps” or, you know, “I feel ill”. And I think that’s . . . the other thing is, I think the number of sick days will come back up again, but people may be more honest about what they’re about.

Isabel Berwick
And that’s a good thing, I think — that it comes to this sort of new transparency that we have in a lot of workplaces now.

Emma Jacobs
Although, I spoke to a manager the other day who said she’s infuriated with the number of reasons that people have to be at home, like waiting for their mother’s Amazon delivery (laughter) or their dog looked a bit sick so they wanted to be at home with them. And then just the sort of thing that wouldn’t have happened pre-pandemic I think is becoming more prevalent. So I think there will be a small backlash. I’m kind of curious where it will settle down.

Isabel Berwick
Right. So Emma thinks there might be a small backlash. Brooke, what’s your take? Where are we going to be in five years' time with sick days?

Brooke Masters
I think it depends partly where we’re going to be with work from home. If it really is like work in the office three days a week, I think sick leave stays lower because people will just work from home on days where they have to wait for the Amazon package. If managers go back to thinking you have to be in the office five days a week, I think sick leave goes back up again.

Isabel Berwick
Even if we’re waiting in for our Amazon packages in reality.

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Isabel Berwick
I don’t think sick leave’s going back to how it was pre-pandemic. We’re both more and less tolerant. I think people are more honest as we discussed in this show, and people are more willing to say that they’re waiting in for an Amazon parcel or they’ve got period pain. But they’re also less tolerant because we’ve lived through Covid, and we know how that is. But ultimately, I think the possibility of flexible working means it’s not a binary any more. It’s not working or not working, particularly for white-collar workers, as Emma was talking about. So that’s potentially more work for us, but also more flexibility. So I think I’d end on the upside of that, probably.

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Thanks to Brooke Masters and Emma Jacobs for this episode, and I’ll put links to Emma’s chart-topping article in the show notes. And please do get in touch with us. We want to hear from you. We’re at workingit@ft.com or with me @IsabelBerwick on Twitter. And if you’re enjoying the podcast, we’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. If you’re an FT subscriber, please sign up for our new Working It newsletter. It’s got behind-the-scenes extras from the podcast and exclusive stories you won’t see anywhere else. Sign up at ft.com/newsletters. Working It is produced by Novel for the Financial Times. With thanks to the producer Anna Sinfield, executive producer Joe Wheeler and the brilliant mix from Chris O’Shaughnessy. From the FT we have editorial direction from Renée Kaplan and Manuela Saragosa and production support from Persis Love. Thanks for listening.

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