“Being truly sick has gone the way of being truly on vacation for many workers,” says Ann Francke, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute, reflecting on how the combination of Covid-19 and regular working from home has led to fresh uncertainty over rules around when and how to do our jobs.
“It’s the new age of ambiguity: are you well enough to work? Are you ill enough to take time off? Who decides?”
The arrival of a rampant summer outbreak of Covid has led to many employees asking such questions for the first time in many months, with managers equally puzzled about when and how their staff should be working as they juggle illness with holidays and family commitments.
The rise of working from home has in particular meant that rules can be opaque for staff facing the sorts of symptoms that suspected cases of Covid and other cold-like illnesses bring. Often these are mild enough to cause workers to second guess their symptoms, exacerbated by a lack of testing. Few workplaces now mandate the need to test for suspected Covid.
HR professionals worry there is a lack of clarity over when a person is ill enough to take time off, when many office jobs can be done as easily from home, near a bed.
One manager of a large financial services business describes the feeling faced by many as “ill-ish”: feeling poorly enough to not want to drag yourself into the office but not sick enough to turn off the computer and stay in bed.
The problem here, she says, is that the people who end up working — probably in a way they would have avoided before remote working became so prevalent — can often take longer to get better or risk getting worse.
The CIPD, the professional body for HR and people development, found in a survey of more than 5,000 workers last year that more than half of employees had done their job despite not feeling well. The pressure to do so, it found, was from the employees themselves rather than the boss.
Amanda Arrowsmith, people and transformation director at the CIPD, says there is now a risk that people will be “iller for longer” given the uncertainty over whether to take time off.
The issue is not necessarily with management, who may not even see or know what their workers are doing or feeling if they are habitually working from home.
“WFH blurs the boundaries with illness just as it does for working time,” says the CMI’s Francke. The focus, she adds, is now often about the needs of an organisation rather than the worker. “Many workplaces have policies designed to stop the spread of illness to others: it’s not about the wellbeing of the person.”
Covid cases rose sharply in the UK this summer, with the number of people in hospital with Covid at the end of June about twice what it was in April. While those numbers are no longer an accurate estimate of infections given that fewer people test or develop bad enough symptoms, companies are experiencing rising numbers of cases among staff in the wake of people celebrating the Euro football tournament, and attending summer gatherings and music festivals.
And it is not just Covid. Cases of whooping cough, which can take many weeks to pass, are also rising this year alongside other colds and sore throats.
The UK’s workplace health regulator, the Health and Safety Executive, says that if a worker has Covid-19 they should try to stay at home, but businesses no longer need to consider the issue in their risk assessment or have specific measures in place. Whether or not there should be a new etiquette around Covid, as opposed to a more traditional cold or flu, still feels uncertain to many.
For workers, the Acas employment arbitration service says that when someone has been off sick with Covid and is ready to go back to work, “they should talk with their employer as early as possible” but “there is currently no legally required length of time someone with Covid should stay off work”.
It is up to the employer to decide how to record absence if it is not safe for a worker to return to the workplace, Acas adds, including when a worker tests positive but is not ill. In such cases, it says, “it is unlikely to be sickness absence”.
The problem is that illnesses such as Covid affect people in different ways — from barely registering symptoms to full-on bedridden ordeals — which can make giving advice more difficult, according to HR executives.
“During [the pandemic] there were clear guidelines. Now people are wondering what they should do,” says Arrowsmith.
The CIPD survey has found the highest rate of sickness absence in a decade — about 7.8 days per employee per year — owing to the impact of Covid on the UK workforce.
But Arrowsmith points to another worrying statistic: the CIPD has found that “presenteeism” is prevalent, with about three quarters of respondents in a survey last year reporting that they were aware of people working when ill over the previous 12 months.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents also reported some sort of “leaveism” — where employees use allocated time off, such as annual leave, to carry out their work despite feeling unwell rather than register these days as sick leave.
Sally Wilson, principal research fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies, says many workplaces are still trying to work out the “new normal” in terms of how workers need to treat illnesses and when they should feel able to work.
But she says working from home has also brought benefits, with some workers embracing the flexibility of being able to work the hours they need rather than feeling forced to go to an office.
“People can often feel worse in the morning, for example, so a flexible timekeeping arrangement can really help,” says Wilson.
Arrowsmith of the CIPD agrees that there are advantages for those that can work from home when dealing with minor ailments, or conditions that can best be treated at home. “For some people it works: they don’t have to face a Tube, or car journey but feel they can still work.”
For HR and management experts, the key to navigating the new rules of when to work with illness is all about communication: managers knowing their staff well enough to know when something is wrong, regardless of whether they are at the office or not, and staff able to rely on their bosses for support and understanding. Employees tend not to discuss their health issues with their boss or employer, the CIPD has found.
Arrowsmith says that “good line management is recognising when people are ill and having good communication so that people feel they can take time off when they need to”.
Francke adds: “Managers need to create an environment that is respectful to the employee and what they need to stay healthy and productive. There are now all shades of grey when dealing with work so we need to be flexible on both sides.”
