News
Alas, the swirling vapours of H1N1 appear to have extended their spiny fingers into our tight little nest at 360, and the leadership team has acquiesced with a pandemic plan that holds the (no doubt assiduously washed) hands of every employee.
With this development, we now have various deputies overseeing our every H1N1-influenced rumination, including one charged with communicating all the scraps of H1N1 news to everyone else.
I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic with all of this, but it seems a bit extraordinary to have to put in writing such common-sense imperatives as the one that says, If you’re sick, stay home! Anyone who’s got school-aged children knows the rules. The kid gets a fever, the kid stays at home until 24 hours after the fever has gone. Full stop.
I appreciate that some folks suffer the pressure to keep up with their workload to such a degree that they feel they simply can’t afford the convalescent time off. We’re all crazy busy, and all with tasks that needed to be finished last week.
But the problem with that kind of thinking is the impact it has on the rest of us, the pathetic masses who put their healthy selves in peril at the office every time a coworker who felt he had no choice but to carry his germs with him sees through that decision.
That he does is nonsense.
We give our employees more than enough sick days to cover their various forays off the healthy path. Nobody should feel compelled to come into work when they’re not well. It’s easy to stay at home.
What isn’t so easy, as a CEO heading up a typical collection of healthy and not-so-healthy individuals, is negotiating the grey area between having sympathy and trying to run a business.
Another thing that’s making me shake my head these days? A news article I saw recently about ERP reseller Tectura Denmark having to write off an astonishing 68,000 hours of work when a project with which it was engaged came seriously off the rails. Its failure forced Tectura to halve its employee count and has generated a deficit of some $58 million.
What’s more, the ordeal has not surprisingly led to accusations of breach of contract from both the UK customer by whom Tectura was retained, and Tectura.
It baffles me how an organization could let something like that get so out of hand.
Illnesses—both real and metaphoric—have no place in corporate Canada. Let’s pay attention, be alert and take action before an at-work sickness of any kind finds its way inside our doors.
