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Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)

#61

Post by maxxxxx »

ElectronShak wrote: post #17
nautilus12 wrote: post #6

Do 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

> Do they determine that people just take more sick days because they need some level of privacy Yeah, I too think this could explain it better. Say a work day is 8 hours, ideally, you cannot work on the same thing for 8 hours. But an open-plan office forces you to do this, or pretend to, because you are being "watched"...and this can be exhausting. A cellular office plan, gives you the privacy to relax, and maybe do…

"An open-office plan encourages collaboration"

They always say that but from my observation this is simply not true.

Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)

#62

Post by fizgig »

maxxxxx wrote: post #57
fizgig wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a big part of it. I currently have 15 PTO days per year, which includes sick leave. If I'm feeling off, I'll ask if I can work from home, which I always get denied (which is odd, since I do after-hours maintenance and on-call incidents remotely). So rather than piss away PTO, I dose up on drugs and drag my ass to the office. If I had dedicated sick leave, I'd just take the day off. But this miserly PT…

I'd say it's time to look for another job. There are better places to work at.

The place (federal government) is great, but my current contract employer has some puzzling policies. I've never had a better work/life balance than this place.

In a few years, the contract will be rebid and I'll roll the dice with my next employer. I rarely get sick, so it's not that big of a deal, but I was highlighting how poor policy can induce sub-optimal choices by the employee.

Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)

#63

Post by [deleted] »

DangerousPie wrote: post #40
arjie wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

[deleted]

Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)

#64

Post by aanastasov »

bretpiatt wrote: post #56

Too many variables to isolate on this study to provide proof that correlation equals causation. Even with the isolating they've tried to do with the 95% CI the range is: 1 Person Office: 1 (They didn't report a range here) 2 Person Office: 1.13-1.98 sick days 3-6 Person Office: 1.08-1.73 sick days (LOWER than 2) 6+ Person Office: 1.30-2.02 sick days Great item to study further. This isn't scientific proof of anything…

You've quoted rates not absolute values.

Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)

#65

Post by aanastasov »

traxmaxx wrote: post #53
aanastasov wrote: post #46

Has anyone been able to find the data used in the study?

Maybe in the PDF? http://www.sjweh.fi/download.php?abstract_id=3167&file_nro=1

I've read (mostly skimmed through) the entire paper and didn't see any mention of the data being public.

Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)

#66

Post by ghaff »

fizgig wrote: post #45
kross wrote: post #29

Root cause: bad sickness/time off/work from home policies.

I think this is a big part of it. I currently have 15 PTO days per year, which includes sick leave. If I'm feeling off, I'll ask if I can work from home, which I always get denied (which is odd, since I do after-hours maintenance and on-call incidents remotely). So rather than piss away PTO, I dose up on drugs and drag my ass to the office. If I had dedicated sick leave, I'd just take the day off. But this miserly PT…

Although it's mostly worked to my personal advantage, I generally loathe the combined PTO plan that's the current style. It's somewhat understandable from an employer's perspective--time you're not working is time you're not working and they don't need to potentially police abuses of sick time--but I still don't like it. "Sorry kids. We can't take that family vacation this year because daddy caught that bad flu last Spring."

But a non-trivial number of people have historically abused dedicated sick time; there are even people cheerfully admitting to it on this thread.

Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)

#67

Post by arjie »

DangerousPie wrote: post #40
arjie wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I've edited the comment to include the mean values from the paper.

I'm comfortable with the two measures as a better summary of the results than the RR in the abstract.

Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)

#69

Post by moron4hire »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #48
fizgig wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a big part of it. I currently have 15 PTO days per year, which includes sick leave. If I'm feeling off, I'll ask if I can work from home, which I always get denied (which is odd, since I do after-hours maintenance and on-call incidents remotely). So rather than piss away PTO, I dose up on drugs and drag my ass to the office. If I had dedicated sick leave, I'd just take the day off. But this miserly PT…

What is PTO?

A bastardization of leave policies that lumps pleasure and rest time in with convalescence such that people new to an office often don't get to take real vacations after having spent all of their PTO on gaining immunity to a new germ pool.

Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)

#70

Post by sheepmullet »

ghaff wrote: post #66
fizgig wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a big part of it. I currently have 15 PTO days per year, which includes sick leave. If I'm feeling off, I'll ask if I can work from home, which I always get denied (which is odd, since I do after-hours maintenance and on-call incidents remotely). So rather than piss away PTO, I dose up on drugs and drag my ass to the office. If I had dedicated sick leave, I'd just take the day off. But this miserly PT…

Although it's mostly worked to my personal advantage, I generally loathe the combined PTO plan that's the current style. It's somewhat understandable from an employer's perspective--time you're not working is time you're not working and they don't need to potentially police abuses of sick time--but I still don't like it. "Sorry kids. We can't take that family vacation this year because daddy caught that bad flu last…

I find combined PTO is great as long as you have enough of it. I get 35 days PTO and I don't have a problem taking a day off when I'm sick.

Now if I only had 15 days PTO....

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