Sick Leave

Very topical post. Wasn't feeling good this morning. Have taken the afternoon off: 4 hours of sick leave.

Brings to mind some interesting stats. At the company I work for, call center staff are sick about 5% of the time. The same metric never crosses 1% among professional staff. I'm pretty sure our call-center staff are as healthy as the professionals, their average age is about 22. So why the gap?

The first effect is measurement. Call center staff are tightly monitored. Lawyers, project managers and financial analysts are not. So lawyers going home at lunch time may not show up in the sick leave stats only because nobody is watching.

Fortunately, some professionals in the IT department log their time very precisely. Sick leave in the IT department breaks the 1% mark, but only just. So there still is a big gap to explain.

The best explanation I've come across for the remaining gap is work piling up. If I'm not at work, nobody else can quickly step in and do my job for me. So my work just piles up. I'll have to work extra hard tomorrow because I'm at home this afternoon. In the call center, I would handle exactly the same number of calls tomorrow, regardless.

I like the Shadow of the Future part of this argument. A lot of good behaviour is created by the Shadow of the Future. Just like a lot of good outcomes are created by the Invisible Hand.