I'm working full remote. My sickness absence is almost 0%, only a few days last year due to a flu.
I'm working in an open plan office. My sickness absence last year was zero.
That's anecdotes for ya.
Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
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Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#32Do they determine that people just take more sick days because they need some level of privacy while they work or because they are actually are getting sick more often? I would think its the former, tbh
Could also be politeness. Maybe I feel okay about sneezing a lot in my own cube, but not on other people. So I take sick days I might not have if I were more isolated.
Indeed this may even help understand why the case of exactly 2 people in an office results in higher absences (50%) than the 3-6 case (36%): You develop a more personal relation with that other person and they're usually not too much of an annoyance, so out of respect for them you stay home when sick.
When you are in a more crowded office this mechanism doesn't kick in because, frankly, you likely hate them at least a bit, and that would explain the lower %.
Finally when packed in a chicken farm scenario, all these mechanisms go out of the window and the sheer amount of germs, noise, distraction and stress you're exposed to trumps every other factor, hence the highest reported (62%) value.
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#33Getting more sick ==> More resistance against diseases? That's always something i'm wondering.
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#34It would be interesting, but perhaps not terribly useful, to see how sickness absence varies between contract and permanent staff. In the past, when contracting, I have dragged myself to work when feeling dreadful.
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#35Table 2: median days of sickness in single person offices in last year: 1.0. Median days of sickness in 6+ person offices: 2.0. Respective means are 4.9 and 8.1.
What's your point? Simply comparing the median is not really going to tell you much, especially since you need to adjust for confounding factors.
When evaluating risk, I like knowing the absolute consequences, not relative consequences. The abstract has the relative consequences. My comment has the absolute consequences.
Since there are maybe a fixed 230 working days in a year, a thing that takes me from 10 absences to 12 absences is worse for me than a thing that takes me from 1 absence to 2 absences. I'd rather not compare the two as 20% up vs 100% up.
If anyone else felt the same, my comment would help.
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#36Isn't this common knowledge? Kids who go to daycare get more sick in the beginning, less sick in general.
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#37I would have bet on it. Greater exposure to germs, probably worse hygiene and higher levels of stress.
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#38Getting more sick ==> More resistance against diseases? That's always something i'm wondering.
People being off for stress related illness doesn't necessarily protect them from future stress (unless their treatment includes resilience). It also increases pressure on colleagues, increasing their risk of stress related illness.
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does that support the hypothesis? One might conclude that the non-open plans mitigate the spread of short term sickness (e.g. colds) instead.
Support, not definite evidence. It could be that both short and long sick leaves are affected. Compared to that, it supports "not actually getting sick more often".
It isn't clear to me how that is supported. Are you saying rates of short-term and long-term sickness ought to have the same correlation with office layout? Why?
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your point? Simply comparing the median is not really going to tell you much, especially since you need to adjust for confounding factors.
When evaluating risk, I like knowing the absolute consequences, not relative consequences. The abstract has the relative consequences. My comment has the absolute consequences. Since there are maybe a fixed 230 working days in a year, a thing that takes me from 10 absences to 12 absences is worse for me than a thing that takes me from 1 absence to 2 absences. I'd rather not compare the two as 20% up vs 100% up. If an…
That's fair enough, but the numbers you give are neither the absolute nor the relative consequences.
You can't draw any conclusions from simply comparing the medians. On one hand that completely ignores any confounding variables which could lead to either over- or underestimation of the true difference. And on the other hand the medians may not be particularly meaningful. For example, if the effect only occurred in the top 25%ile of employees, the median would stay the same even if all of the ones in open plan offices were sick for the entire year.
If you took the mean instead of the median the difference would already be 8.1 - 4.9 = 3.2 days.