Can we drive a stake through the heart of the perfect attendance award?
Its death is long overdue. Not because society doesn’t value people who show up for work regularly, but because too many of us do so when it would be better if we stayed home.
One revelation from the current coronavirus pandemic is how easily we make each other sick. In an often-cited example, an unvaccinated teacher in California pulled down her mask last May to read to students and infected 12 out of 24 of them with COVID. That single incident led to 26 positive cases in one small elementary school.
The same is likely true of other contagious conditions that aren’t tracked as closely.
How many of us have gone to work with a slight fever or roiling stomach, intending to “power through”? Maybe we don’t want to leave our department shorthanded on a busy day. Or the coworker who is our usual backup is on vacation.
Far from being team players, though, we are selfishly risking the health of colleagues and customers, some of whom may be more susceptible to whatever junk we are peddling.
Perfect attendance awards (and the financial bonuses that accompany them) exacerbate this situation. Corporations don’t intend this, of course. The goal is to encourage associates not to take a Ferris Buehler’s Day Off just because the sun is shining.
Schools have the same objective. Teachers can’t teach anything to an empty seat, so when Junior’s at home playing Call of Duty or binge-watching Netflix, he isn’t learning how to write a rhetorical analysis or solve a quadratic equation. Plus, the time it takes to catch him up when he does return to school limits the time teachers spend with the rest of the class.
Intuitively, it feels that rewarding students for coming to school regularly should make them do it more often. This should, in turn, build better work habits for life. Except this is a case where intuition fails.
A 2014 study by Harvard, UCLA and Stanford found that ceremonies where students were given a surprise perfect-attendance award caused them to miss more school later.
The reason may be that students didn’t want to be publicly identified as exceptional, or that the awards made them realize they were overachieving, so they decided to start missing occasionally.
For students who are positively motivated by potential attendance rewards, schools hit the public-health wall. Kids come in sick when they should be home, trading germs like baseball cards in classrooms, cafeterias and playgrounds.
If bonuses for perfect attendance in the workplace lead to unsafe and unhealthy environments, and if recognition for perfect attendance can backfire in schools, what’s the point? Corporate America and academia need to find better rewards using some other set of criteria.
I say this with some degree of consternation, if not hypocrisy. As a student, I missed only four days of high school — two during my freshman year (I was sick) and two during my senior year (I was sick and tired).
In the workplace, I pride myself on being present as much as possible. Early in my teaching career, I was so sick one day that I locked my classroom during lunch, crawled under my desk and slept until students woke me by pounding on the door. I somehow staggered to my feet, feverish and achy, and taught the rest of the afternoon.
That was stupid, a result of a misguided work ethic, toxic masculinity (never show weakness) and an overexaggerated sense of my own importance (the class couldn’t survive without me). Who knows how many students I made sick?
Of course, some workers don’t have the option to stay home when ill, even if they want to. Many businesses have attendance policies that are downright draconian, meaning workers are one bout of the flu away from termination, or must hoard precious sick days like Gollum with his stolen ring, saving them for childcare emergencies.
So these workers show up sick, propped up by co-workers who expect the same consideration when they are on death’s door, spreading their germs throughout the workplace and community.
What a way to run a railroad.
At the very least, companies and schools need to stop mythologizing the Iron Man ethos and normalize taking time off. It would also help if employee mental health became a bigger priority, so that the aforementioned Ferris Bueller's Day Off is viewed not as playing hooky, but as a necessary way to recharge batteries and decrease stress. Wouldn’t hurt to offer childcare options, too.
Save the bonuses for performance and innovation, not for mere presence. After all, if 90% of life is showing up, that’s an awfully low bar, isn’t it?
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment