The benefits of allowing employees to work from home are numerous and well-documented. In addition to the long list of environmental and work-life benefits, solitude is required when your employees’ heads are many levels deep in work. Then, with a click of a button, they can join a virtual meeting full of coworkers through fast and reliable teleconferencing.
But what may be one of the least recognized advantages of working from home? Sick days! Set up properly; your company’s policy on sick days can benefit both the company and the teleworker. Companies with traditional offices can reduce sick days by allowing staff to work from home during illnesses and recovery.
Let’s Agree On This
There are some sicknesses/accidents/injuries where your employees should stay home and recover in bed. Period. Nobody believes working as a zombie, even from home, benefits anyone. Stay in bed and rest. This blog is not about you. However, if you are sick or recovering from an illness or accident but are up to working, I invite you to read on.
Sickness in a Remote Office
The apparent advantage of a coworker staying home when sick is that the chance of you catching what they have is gone. You have been a little under the weather at some point in your career, knowing you could perform fine in the right setting. This is where the home office shines! Having experienced a recent illness in which my recovery precluded me from traveling to an office, I was so glad to be able to work from home. Don’t get me wrong. I am not espousing ‘working through the pain.’ I’m talking about keeping your mind and body active during your recovery.
After my one-week stay in the hospital, I was itching to re-engage in my work. My recovery did not require me to be bedridden, but I could not travel. I was mobile, alert, and eager to work again. And, being a remote worker, I could start up and work through the entire recovery process…from home. Because my company utilizes business management apps like Slack, I was always ‘in the loop.’ Projects moved forward, and the company was able to meet its deadlines.
I felt good about working again, and the company was not on the hook for my recovery. On the other hand, my wife, who works in a traditional office and was instrumental in my care at home, needed to use sick and personal days to transport me to doctor appointments. Her company’s policy worked well for us. My company’s policy worked even better, allowing me to work from home during recovery.
Sickness in a Traditional Office
Often, in a traditional office setting, you know you are not feeling 100% but must decide whether to go into the office or not. This decision impacts you and everyone you come into contact with that day! That’s some severe pressure first thing in the morning! You feel well enough to work, but are you contagious? You suspect coworkers will judge you on how sick you are when you take a sick day. But, if you go into the office, you worry they’ll blame you for every sniffle and sneeze in the company for the next month. In a traditional office, you are either SICK or you are WELL. You are either IN, or you are OUT.
Sick Leave Policies
For many companies, sick leave is an integral part of an array of benefits that are provided to employees, and with good reason. The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) already requires unpaid time for personal or family illness. As of February 2018, in Maryland, employers with 15 or more employees must provide up to 40 hours of earned, paid sick and safe leave. If your company employs 14 or fewer employees, you must offer unpaid sick and safe leave. The Maryland law specifies allowable carryover hours from one year to the next and places caps on total accrued hours. It also lists permissible reasons to take sick time, including to care for the physical or mental health of yourself or a family member, maternity and paternity leave, and relief from domestic or sexual assault. So, the future is clear. To stay compliant and competitive, you will need to incorporate sick days into your benefits package if you still need to do so.
How Many Sick Days to Give
You want to provide sick days to your workforce. But how many? The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website shows that, on average, employees in a professional, technical, executive, or administrative position have an average of 8.5 sick days available to them after one year with a company, growing to over ten days annually after 25 years. However, more and more companies are offering a paid time off (PTO) policy that combines sick, vacation, and personal days into one bank of days that employees use at their discretion. This provides employees with more flexibility to manage their time off.
Update Your Company Sick Day Policy
If your company's sick day policy still needs to include language that allows and encourages your workforce to work from home instead of taking sick days, you may benefit from making this change. Your employees will help because they will not need personal days or vacation time to recuperate from an illness. And your company will notice fewer days missed by employees and fewer impacts on productive work.
Just to let you know, if paid sick time is provided, you are not required to pay employees for accrued sick time when the employee leaves your employment. Regardless of how you set your ill day policy – whether in a separate pot of days accumulated over time or tied to vacation and personal days – you should include the option to work remotely, if possible. And working remotely is more than just a sick day perk. In a recent Gallup poll, 35% of employees said the number one perk they’d leave a job for is the ability to work remotely full-time. However, only 12% of poll responders said their employer allows it.
Not Too Sick to Work, Just Too Sick for the Office
With a well-planned sick day policy allowing employees to work from home, you can attract and retain better talent, lower absenteeism rates, and improve your bottom line. And, take it from me: nobody enjoys being sick or in an extended recovery period. With my recent illness, I didn’t feel like I was genuinely recovering until I was back to work in my home office.
