my company wants us to harass overworked employees into taking less sick leave

A reader writes:

My department just called all us middle managers into a session to discuss our sickness “issue.” Some context: We live in a country where permanent employees of any level at any company all get unlimited sick days at full pay for a year (with a handful of caveats). Funnily enough, the sickness rate here isn’t particularly high: the average local worker takes three days off for sickness per year.

Our company has been through a painful year-long layoff process, which coincided with record-breaking profits, the launch of completely new product lines, and somewhat absurd expectations. Oh, and team celebration budgets were cut in the meantime. Our department frankly hit it out of the park: Our department alone is more profitable than our next two biggest competitors combined. We are about 15% above target, and have been for around three years. Yet this wasn’t enough to protect many of our strongest performers from layoffs because “their roles could be done from a cheaper country.”

Combined with fact that a huge number of us work way beyond the 40 hours a week in our job descriptions — and the fact that overtime is, very legally, unpaid — our sickness rates are way above the national average. (Fun fact: my VP was convinced that the reason we work so much overtime is because we can’t prioritize. When I went to him with a list of tasks we had to do, a recommendation on what order to do them in, and the corresponding minimal deadline extensions we’d need, he just said, “No, get it all done. You’re making me feel blocked.”) We’re currently at 26 sick days per employee per year!

So, most of us think the cause for this is pretty obvious. Our HR department and leadership see it a bit differently, though. And now to the meeting.

Alison, it was like they had read your blog for the past 10 years and done the exact opposite of what you advise when teams are burning out. Some of the highlights:

• They started the talk by saying, “Illness costs us too much money” and ended by saying, “Let’s bring the price down of sick leave together.” Incidentally, the price of sickness in our department is well below the amount by which we exceeded our targets this year.

• They said we should insist our employees phone us in the morning (on our personal cells; none of us have company phones or desk phones) and tell us when they can’t come in for the day instead of sending a Slack message (we’re very much Slack-first at my company so the request is really out of touch) and if they have a flu or migraine, we should recommend that they come back to work after lunch if they feel a bit better so they “don’t lose a day of productivity.” I pointed out the power differential between manager and worker that makes a “suggestion” feel like pressure even if not intended, and they said, “Well, they’re putting pressure on everyone else when they’re sick.”

• They told us we should be calling sick employees every two days to ask if they’re feeling better and what they plan to do to get better. When we pointed out how invasive that’s likely to feel, they said, “It’s completely normal. You’d do that with a family member, right? That’s what you should be doing here, too.”

• They said we should always ask them if they’ve seen a doctor for any ailment. When someone pointed out that not everyone has a family doctor, let alone goes to them for every migraine, they said, “See? To me, that’s a clear sign that they’re not even trying to take care of their own health.”

• They acknowledged that most illnesses in our department were related to burnout. Their solution is for us to “normalize talking about mental health” with our employees in our team meetings.

• When we pointed out that none of us thought this would actually make our employees less sick, they shared a “resource package” with us. This package was basically instructions on how to log sick days in our HR tool so HR can better track it, a link to a mental health app, and the phone number for our employee assistance program (current wait time: four to six months). We asked if they were planning on addressing the obvious root cause of our burnout problem, and they said, “That’s confidential.”

I already know that everything they’ve asked us to do is totally legal. And they’re not going to change their minds. And we have already pushed back. They’ve made clear they’re not budging, and that they’ll be checking much more closely to make sure we’re doing everything they’ve told us to do.

So … I guess my question is, knowing that this is just the way it’s going to be and that I won’t be able to recognize my employees with more money or less absurd deadlines, how do I enforce policies like “normalize talking about mental health” and “providing resource packages” and “asking them if they’ve gone to the doctor about every little ailment” and “caring for them like a family member” in a way that is minimally compliant, ideally actually helpful, and in a best case scenario makes clear without my needing to say it that I fundamentally disagree with HR’s master plan to reduce the time my people spend sick by making them feel like thieves for using sick leave?

Your company is run by loons.

I particularly like their assertion that you should be calling sick family members every two days to ask what they plan to do to get better. I intend to implement that in my own family right away, and I will update you later in the year to let you know whether it led to total or only partial estrangement.

Anyway, can you just … not comply? Would they know? Most of what they’re asking you to do would happen outside their view, and they wouldn’t really know whether you’re suggesting people come back in the afternoon after a morning out with the flu (!) or inquiring into their doctor visits or harassing the crap out of sick employees by phone (especially since you don’t have company phones so they really have no way of tracking it!). They said they’ll be checking but, practically speaking, how? Are they going to follow up with your employees to ask whether you suggested they see a doctor for every migraine? (And if so, okay, tell your employees that’s what’s going on and so their answer to that question should always be yes. When your management is this out of their gourd, you don’t have a duty of loyalty to hide it from your team. If anything, you have a duty of loyalty to tell your team.)

But I’m also curious what would happen if you just all stopped overworking yourselves so much. Yes, they’re pilling work on you and so you’re all working massive overtime to get it all done, but what would happen if you just … didn’t? What would happen if you held firm on saying things like, “We can do X and Y by next week, but that means Z won’t happen until the following week and W will have to be back-burnered indefinitely?” And if they respond by telling you no, it all has to happen faster, what if you simply said, “Realistically, we don’t have the staffing to do that, so here’s how we’re prioritizing things and let me know if you want these ordered differently”? Because the thing is, you presumably are setting some boundaries already, whether you think about it that way or not — you’re presumably building people’s need to sleep into your project timelines and would hold firm if they tried to get you to work 24/7 — so this is just a question of drawing the line in a different place.

Obviously there’s a danger that they’ll fire some or all of you if you do that, so you need to have a realistic sense of how much capital and leverage you have (as well as how willing you are to take that risk), but very, very, very often when people are being overworked to the point of needing 26 sick days a year, there’s actually more room than they realize for them to set different boundaries; they’ve just been assuming they can’t.

Also, though — and I know this is easier said than done — you all should be working on leaving, because this company is wildly dysfunctional, it’s literally making your team members sick, and they sound very likely to lay any of you off tomorrow if they find a profitable way to do it.

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