It was an irresistible headline; Man skipped work for 5 years and no one noticed until he won an award. I spotted it in 2016 and had to hit print. This true story occurred in the Spanish public sector, which probably comes as no surprise to many.
But far less funny, was the recent story of the Wells Fargo employee who died at her desk in Tempe, Arizona and wasn’t noticed for four days.
I get how the first story happens. If you’ve ever had the job of checking for ghosts on a payroll, (i.e., checking whether employees really exist) or daring to ask, ‘who manages Joe Bloggs?,’ you can encounter very interesting responses and understand how easily such grifts can occur. But dying at your desk? How can it be that no-one notices an inert corpse at a desk? Wells Fargo is a bank. Wouldn’t security walk around the floor now and then? To be fair, employees did notice a bad smell, but assumed it was bad plumbing. (That alone is worth a blog post on normalised workplace conditions).
I raise these stories because one of the arguments in favour of returning to work after Covid, is that businesses cannot manage health and safety when they do not have any control over the whereabouts of an employee. But clocking on is not enough. It never was. Someone needs to be paying attention.
Managers certainly cannot manage the health and welfare of people who pretend to be working from home, and are instead, ‘quiet vacationing.’ This is a polite new term for being on holiday and failing to tell your boss. Another term for this is fraud or obtaining a benefit through deception. It would be a cheek to put in an injury claim for falling off a motorbike in Bali, when you’re supposed to be home in Ballina, yet I predict the claims will come.
There are degrees of p*ss taking going on in the world of Working from Home. As one colleague noted, golf courses are now busy on weekdays and so are gyms. My hairdresser tells me that ‘Saturdays are no longer like old Saturdays’ when salons were rushed off their feet dealing with working clients. Most of our mid-week appointments now are clients who are supposed to be at work. Their bosses think they’re at a desk. In fact, they’re in a different kind of swivel chair with a head covered in foil. (A joke about hot air will come to me eventually).
To add to the confusion, Australian workplaces were covered by the Right to Disconnect workplace legislation as of last month. This is not intended to stop anyone sending emails or texts out of hours, or in different time zones. It is designed to protect employees from punishment for ignoring the out of hours unreasonable communication. It might be more flexible where people are paid staggering amounts to be available, or for people who work in critical roles, but that tricky old word ‘reasonable’ will be left up to a Fair Work Commissioner. No wonder employers are worried.
This has come along at a time when some employers are still struggling to get employees back to the workplace. PWC (in the UK) have just announced that they will be monitoring all employees by their devices and expect everyone to appear in the office for three days a week at a minimum. It might sound invasive, or a little too controlling, but I would suggest the breach of trust provoked the measure. We live in democracies. We don’t work in them.
I sympathise with managers who must spell out the meaning of an employment contract, but I can also understand the need for the disconnecting rule. I have been on the butt end of pointless phone calls and meetings out of hours, for things that could wait. Invariably these demands came from people who had no work life balance and didn’t think anyone else should either.
Clearly the workplace is changing, and the psychological contract is in a state of flux. I don’t think anyone should live to work and there are many decent workplaces where new terms, using common sense, will be applied. To be optimistic, we might hope that better performance management might emerge, with clearer contracts and improved communication, so that everyone knows what is required and to what standard.
As for the poor soul in Tempe Arizona, it is sobering to contemplate the employee who wasn’t noticed by anyone in the office for two entire working days and wasn’t missed when she did not come home all weekend. Perhaps we could look out for each other as human beings – just a little bit better.