New York Diary

Head Cold

I'm sick. Not exciting, stay-home-from-work, go-to-the-doctor sick, just runny-nosed and stuffy-headed. It's no fun.

I suppose being sick is never any fun, but I nonetheless do remember the days when being sick meant staying home and watching baseball and Matlock, reading, and drinking Kool-Aid. At some point, it just became a hassle to stay home if sick. At some point, it became an irresponsibiity.

And so, my friends, today was a work day like any other, except that I went through two boxes of Kleenex and several individually-wrapped packets of Advil. (Ah, luxury, to work at a place that provides such ridiculously cost-ineffective things as individually-wrapped Advil tablets.) For lunch I had soup. I worked more slowly than usual.

Why do we work like this? Sanity and germ control indicate that I should have taken this day off to rest and recover before becoming actually sick. Personal and professional responsibility dictates the opposite. There's a trade-off between duty overlap and absence coverage in the workplace, and it's not clear where the happy medium should be. The more that someone else can cover for me in my absence, the better. But the more that people can cover for me, the less I'm needed to do my job even in my presence.Too much overlap, and there's no point in paying me in the first place. Too little, and it's a crisis if I can't come in.

Of course, once it's reached a certain size, a company can just about always count on somebody being out on any given day. In that case, one can predict redundancy. Sure, we might hire 100 people to do the work of only 99, but if any given person has a 1/100 chance of being out on any given day, this allows for reasonable coverage. And it's not like a single individual is the redundant one; they're all a bit redundant, in a wholly reasonable way.

Smaller companies, or smaller departments within large companies, or small groups within departments, have it much harder. If I'm one of only four people at the office who does anything related to Product X, it's makes a lot less sense to hire a fifth employee for the group just to help cover on the odd days when I or my three coworkers are out. Most of the time, there'll just be no work for employee # 5 to do.

This, of course, is the great argument of scale. It forgets something important, though. Sure, it might be rough on my three coworkers when I'm out sick, but the flip side is that I actually might know all three of them well. We aren't just cogs in a giant scaled-up corporate machine; we have drinks together, sympathize when others are sick, and cover for one another out of slightly more than just professional obligation. What we lose in cost efficiency and predictable sick day coverage, we make up for in actually liking our jobs and knowing our coworkers.

This is no small point. Wall Mart, are you listening?

posted by Skay @ 6:38 PM