I think a workplace is unhealthy when unhealthy employees feel so compelled to come to work, they'll risk getting their coworkers sick. The stomach flu is sort of making the rounds here, and today one of my co-workers said that her child was throwing up yesterday, and she wasn't feeling so hot, and yet, here she was! At work.
I've never worked in a place where it was okay to be sick, and I've also never worked at a place that didn't ration sick time like it were the most precious asset on Earth. And I've read article after article about how fatigued and sick employees actually cost their employees money. And no employer I've ever known has encouraged its sick employees to stay home. It pisses me off, because I don't want to be sick anymore than you do, but by coming here, to the workplace, with your germs and diseases, you're putting all of us at risk.
I've seen employees being reamed out for taking sick time, or for asking to leave work early because they were sick. It's never happened to me, but then again, I'm minus sick time (like, I have to earn my way back to 0 hours of sick time) because of my illness in December. I'm working under the assumption that as of right now, if I get sick, I can't take sick time. I'd either have to come to work sick, or stay home without pay. I can tell you right now that any day of the week I'm staying home, because working only seems to make me sicker, and I have enough respect for my job and the people I work with to not bring my disease here, and spread it around. I don't think my work is the same when I'm sick, either, and I hate doing shoddy work.
(And you know, I'm not talking about mental health days, or just plain cheating. I think that you can generally tell when someone is sick, or has been sick. You know, when they're coughing up a lung in their office, you can be pretty sure that something's not right. Or when all they're eating all day is chicken broth--yeah, that makes you suspicious that something's not right. In fact, it feels to me like the people who are actually getting sick are paying for the people who aren't, and who are using sick time as personal time, thus making employers reluctant to be generous with it, and reluctant to be nice to their sick employees when they do make it back to work. It's another one of those blanket rules that harm the good people.)
Either way, I think I'll reach the zenith of my working life when I work at a place that doesn't treat getting sick as a personal failing, which as we all know, it's not. Sometimes people just get sick. It'd be nice to know it wouldn't hurt me professionally.
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