No, his boss isn't stupid, he's exercising the "duty of care" part of being a decent boss. If you're sick, you should stay home and recover, whether you think you can be as productive or not (from personal experience of breaking this rule - you probably won't be).
Meh. From personal experience, taking motor transport makes me throw up if I'm at all sick, but I'm otherwise usually fine. If my choice is "do nothing, or spend 90 minutes commuting to and from work" then I'll do nothing. If I can work from home, I'll pretty much have a normal work day.
Same here - in fact, I've had to say this to members of my own team recently. It's strictly forbidden by HR - if you're sick, you take days off until you're better, so you are not putting yourself at risk of getting worse/prolonging the issue by not getting the rest you need. WFH is not there as a handy tool to avoid recording sick leave.
What a shitty place. If you feel under the weather, you're starting to get some sniffles or a little bit of a sore throat, just work from home. Sick time is for when you are actually sick, work from home is a tool for when you might be getting sick so you don't spread it.
Personally, I don't need excuses, I work from home whenever. It does seem that it is a rare place that treat's its emplpoyees as adults though.
I think it matters a lot whether sick days are tracked. If they aren't, taking a sick day when you're under the weather, so you're on your feet tomorrow, is entirely reasonable. If they are, then you're wasting an allocated sick day, yes.
Does your employer not treat its employees as adults? Shouldn't adults be able to be honest about how many sick days they need, without tracking?
Sick and I don't feel the best are different things. Sick I need to stop and rest, I don't feel the best could be I didn't sleep much the night before or I could be coming down with something. Neither of the latter requires me to stop working, causing work to pile up for myself and others on the team. I do however, have the option of playing it safe and trying not to infect others while also not causing a back log of work.
Forcing a sick day because I woke up with a headache and a sore throat that could be nothing is not going to endear the company to an employee, on the otherhand that same situation that turns out to be something but I have to come in because I'm not sick yet is prettyshitty to everyone else you come in contact with. In both cases, working from home is the safe course of action.
Now, where I work, that option is fully supported. I, and basically every full time employee, has a vpn and a ip phone. There is nothing about my job that requires physical presence in the office on a normal day, and with the team spread out accross the US anyway, my being in the office or remote really are the same thing as far as everyone else is concerned. I can work from home (doing it right now) simply because I felt like it that day.
> Shouldn't adults be able to be honest about how many sick days they need
Yep, but I'm talking about when you're not sick, but you feel like you might be coming down with something, or you're feeling like you're over it but we all know you're probably still infectious. A fully supported working from home environment allows you to be far more conciderate to those you work with. Hell you can also get more rest, since that appears to be what many are hung up on, because you no longer have a commute those days, but still get stuff done because you don't feel like you're dying.
> Does your employer not treat its employees as adults? Shouldn't adults be able to be honest about how many sick days they need, without tracking?
Should they? Yes.
However, by your definition the vast, vast majority of employers do not treat their employees like adults. Even those in this industry, which seems to be the only one to adopt "take as you need" sick and vacation time in any significant way.
This is mostly a reaction to the incredulity I (perhaps mis-)read in your statement.
It mostly seemed odd to say/imply "My employer treats me like an adult" about permissive WFH, but then turn around and assume that sick days must be carefully tracked. And it seemed like a number of people were talking past each other based on having opposite assumptions about both of these.
As someone who has to give the news about the review outcome, I can confirm this from my own experience as well. Pretty much only those who come out of it as "top-tier" get any benefit, and no amount of "spin" will cushion the news of anything lesser. Of course, this isn't helped by there being an enforced normalisation curve on the ratings…
We possibly work for the same company, as our system - flaws and all - are identical to what you describe. As someone who has to carry out both sides of the process (reviewing staff/managing them through the process, and getting my own review done), I'm most certainly not a fan! Staff seem to fall into two categories - those who see the whole thing as political nonsense they don't have the time for, or have become so turned off by how bad it is that they just don't care about the outcome any more.
The Accenture news was raised on an internal discussion about the review process almost immediately, as some people are that keen to get rid of the current way of doing things ASAP. Sadly, I can't see anything coming from it, as the word is that Upper Management values the generated metrics too much to change anything.
well, don't blame them. above certain position (which is usually pretty low), politics overcome skills in terms of progress in career. so what do you expect from bullshitters who bullshitted their way up there into positions of power, that they would cut off their own source of (current and future) success? :)
I work in same type of company, and it's pretty obvious how this and similar corporate cr*p clearly doesn't bring the best out of people, sometimes in contrary. If I would be owner/shareholder of any company, ever, first thing I would be concerned how incentives/bonuses for that extra mile/good work are being given. The higher the management, the more bonuses would be tied to long term progress (i know it's easier written than done, but i consider it at least partly responsible for financial turmoil of recent years too).
Rather than politics, I think the primary motivation is predictability and control over costs and the ability to link costs to the company's financial performance. A ranking process that buckets employees into performance categories allows you to determine the company-wide increase in salaries and the bonus pool first and work backwards to arrive at each employee's raise/bonus. And since bonuses are usually timed with the end of the fiscal year, that increase (or lack thereof) can be based entirely on the numbers they deliver to investors.
Also, by forcing a relative appraisal of each employees performance, you force managers to view employees with a more critical eye. If I were to simply have to answer, "did X do a good job on this project?", my answer would almost always be yes, absent any incentive to say no. But there are members of my team who deliver significantly better than others, so the calibration process forces me to find a way to put them above the team members who perform at a lower level. Getting rid of performance reviews would, from what I've seen, create a culture of "don't screw up" rather than one of taking risks and trying to do as well as possible.
As a manager who both received an annual performance review and delivered 10 of them in the past week (our FY15 ends 7/31), I hate the process more than most people. But I think this discussion is ignoring the advantages just because we all hate the process. We run the risk of creating a whole new process that we hate just as much as the old process. Because it all boils down to finding an impartial way to evaluate performance and, unless you can crack that nut, your process isn't going to work. Top performers will move on and you'll be left with only under-performers. And that's because humans naturally evaluate their circumstances relatively rather than absolutely, once you get beyond the basics (i.e. can I pay rent and bills). Someone making $100k/yr is going to feel underpaid if someone they feel they're better than makes more. Just because the current system for ranking is flawed doesn't mean that there doesn't mean that ranking isn't necessary.
I'd say that having performance reviews enforces:
1) culture of "don't screw up". (Yes, opposite to your thought) What risks would anyone will want to take if it means preparing yourself to be scapegoat if something will not work out perfectly?
2) enormous amount of politics, lies, and self-promoting by shameless liars and back-stabbers. How can you tell whether someone delivered significantly better then others? In most cases it's mutual BS feeding/consuming between manager and certain type of employees.
> How can you tell whether someone delivered significantly better then others?
I can tell because I don't suck at my job. I look at pull requests. I look at ticket completion. I'm with my engineers during planning to know whether people are padding their estimates. I make a note whenever someone steps up in some way (handling emergencies off hours, helping another developer get their work done, etc.) If a manager doesn't understand the work of the people s/he's managing, that manager is unqualified to do the job.
As to your 1), it all depends on what type of culture a company has and how much employees are punished for screwing up. At a company like Facebook, you're expected to "move fast and break things." I'd be very surprised if people were inhibited there. If you're at a bank where screw ups mean someone gets fired, you're probably right.
The review/ranking process is not going to influence if top performers stay one way or another.
I'm strongly skeptical that the review process that I've seen various company is any good at helping to make the real connections between employee performance and company bottom lines. In the end, the ranking process of doling out salaries is fooling itself by cloaking the process in numbers.
That's what I'm trying to figure out too. For that matter, why couldn't I just take the messenger.com site and wrap it in a Chrome app myself (which is what this looks like anyway)? That way at least, I can be reasonably sure I'm not leaking my FB credentials to a third party. I know the average user won't know how to do that, but then the average user would just launch messenger.com in their browser anyway.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, who is this for?
It's not forced. You can very easily not pay the license fee. I don't, and haven't for ~18 months, with the full knowledge of the TV License authority. You just have to follow a simple rule of not watching or listening to live TV or radio broadcasts.
I met mine on Tinder, 7 months ago. We moved in together last month. Before that I'd done the "normal" chatting up someone in a bar (that's how I met my ex-wife), or meeting through acquaintances.
Online dating can work really well, if you approach it the right way. I still have loads of friends among girls I met through one dating site or another as well, so it can help you find girl friends as well as a girlfriend.
Me and a friend tried it with a (UK) bank note while we were at school, way back in the 90's, and received a warning about not being allowed to print scanned currency on screen when the scan finished. It might not have been Photoshop we used (Paint Shop Pro springs to mind), but similar detection techniques have been around for a long time!
As someone who's travelled 10,000 mile round-trips for final interviews, only to lose out on "culture fit," I find it the most frustrating excuse for not getting a job I have otherwise proven over previous interview rounds that I am capable for. Why? Because it's totally unquantifiable and subjective. Fair enough if you find a hole in my technical ability which would limit my performance in the job you want me to do, but using "culture" as the excuse is a nonsense.
There could be any number of reasons someone might not appear to "fit" on a given interview day, which wouldn't necessarily apply in them in the day-to-day - jet lag, the stress of the interview process, being under the weather and many more...
People and cultures adapt over time, through contact with each other; if you're denying good candidates because of their "fit" in the now, you're artificially limiting yourself for the future.
> Being able to share data plans with phones at nominal cost would be one interesting upgrade driver but that's really in the hands of the carriers and is unlikely
Vodafone in the UK will let you do this (with no extra fee). They've offered me it several times, but I didn't buy an iPad with a SIM slot.
