My two years in corporate america was open floor; side by side plus in front of you. When someone was sick, it usually took down the people sitting within the quadrant. Since there wasn't sick days, everything was under PTO and Vacation > Recovering at home. Just not a good system.
Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
171–180 of 203 posts
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cover your sneeze. Cover your cough. Stay home when sick. These are kindergarten-level cultural learnings. A friend/colleague of mine is suffering from Chronic sinusitis and she usually sneezes every morning for around 20-30 times (random number, I know!) over period of few hours. The 'sneezing fit' is 100% of the time non-contagious yet loud and 'full with watery substance', She covers her sneezing most of the tim…
Be realistic. We're talking about the 99.9% of other people who don't have that condition.
The CDC says 12.1% of the adult US population has sinusitis[1].
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Expecting that people should control their sneezes is a ridiculous cultural norm.
And what about saying "bless you?" People sure have superstitious hangups about sneezing. And I don't mind, it doesn't hurt anything, until I get a sarcastic "you're welcome" from people for not thanking them for blessing me. I seriously don't get that. When did saying "bless you" require an official display of gratitude? I didn't ask for anything and would just like to sneeze in peace, please.
I think you are too comfortable casually dismissing a cultural behavior that has existed across different forms for millenia. Perhaps there are interpersonal, cultural, body-language, psychological, and other ways that this behavior is important to us, and your certainty at its unimportance seems out-of-proportion to its continued prevalence and an over-estimation of the quality of the possible completeness of your analysis.
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#174Earlier 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…
Why on earth are sick days included in your paid time off? If you're sick, you're sick? I assume you're in the USA, given that barbaric policy?
The root problem I think is that the US has too few vacation days. This resulted in many people abusing sick day policies by taking sick days off for things that really should be "vacation" days. But management fought the symptom, not the cause, by just pooling vacation and sick days.
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#175This makes me wonder how many of those additional absences in open plan offices are due to depression / introverts recoiling in horror rather than increased biological pathogen transmission.
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Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#17662% more days of sick leave is an acceptable trade off for most employers. If the alternative is a separate office for everyone, the rent expenses will be more than the paid leave loss. And the only thing upper management cares about is the bottom line. So in a sense, increased productivity in the economy is partially paid by our degrading health. That's not something often mentioned in the Economics text books.
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#177Noise, permanent distraction, regular interruption, no privacy, and people spreading germs all over the place. No wonder that people get sick! I would rather be poor than work in a shared office one more time. (I have experienced both, so I know what I'm talking about.)
So have I. I wouldn't.
I bet it depends on how poor you were, and how noisy the open plan was. Tolerances also vary.
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#178Too 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…
There is a perfect positive correlation between smoking + alcohol consumption and health! 1 person: heavy smokers 15%, drinkers 16% 3-6 pers: heavy smokers 13%, drinkers 16%, sick leave +36% 2 pers: heavy smokers 10%, drinkers 15%, sick leave +50% > 6 pers: heavy smokers 9%, drinkers 13%, sick leave +62% Please drink and smoke more to fight sickness.
They said they controlled for those confounding variables. I bet the raw data used in this study also says smokers and drinkers are more often sick than the others.
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ever since companies ditched vacation and sick leave in favor of combined PTO, I work while sick. When I had sick leave, I used it. It may well be that they don't want to cut their July vacation short by a day because they caught a cold in January. And to compound the issue, it was probably a cold they caught at work, because the company leave policy reinforces the behavior. People who stay home when sick are punishe…
Here in the Netherlands you can get back your vacation days if you get sick during your vacation. Might not earn as much in the US, but some benefits...
It's like that in Germany too. Days you are sick during a vacation are counted as sick days, not vacation days. (Why not, you're sick aren't you?)
Some uptight employers require a doctor's note but most just roll with it.
That always stuck me as a profoundly civilized attitude.
Re: Sickness absence associated with shared and open-plan offices (2011)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the first time it's occurred to me that other people cannot control their sneezes. I've had the occasional "where the hell did that come from?" sneeze, but they're a rare exception, maybe a few times a year. I cannot fathom not being able to control something like a sneeze; to me, it would feel like not being able to control farting, coughing or talking.
One of these things is not like the others. People should be able to control talking (assuming they know it bothers the people around them).
I struggled to come up with things that, to me, would be very strange to not be able to control anymore.
I know there are medical conditions that prevent you from controlling all three - I've had coughs bad enough that I couldn't help it, and there are definitely bowel conditions that mean your sphincter isn't 100% reliable, and there is Tourette's and assorted mental conditions that basically make it difficult to impossible to control your speech.