Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Bad things happen in the lives of employees. Other employees are asked to show consideration. This works for a short while. Managers need to act properly and quickly.

Many years ago, I went to a fellow employee to retrieve some information from an equipment inventory. It was a mess. The guy didn’t have the right information, wouldn’t correct his mistakes, and dismissed me to those places that folks are dismissed to when someone just doesn’t want to talk to them.

I explained what happened to another co-worker. “Oh,” said the other co-worker, “his wife died two weeks ago. They had been married 40 years. He is grieving. He hasn’t been the same since. Please consider his situation.”

Of course that was a tragedy. Of course the man was grieving. Of course he wasn’t doing his job as well as he had always done it. And, of course, I needed information from the inventory system so that I could satisfy the dozens of persons who also needed it. I needed this man or someone else to do his job.

Bad things happen in the lives of employees. Of course we need to consider their losses and their time of grieving. And of course, the job still has to be done. Sometimes I can make up for the other person’s loss and do their job for them. Sometimes I cannot.

Here is where we the managers do our jobs. Other employees can make up for the loss of work from a grieving person. That, however, has its limits. Those limits are smaller than most of us managers would like.

If managers want to allow a person to grieve, do something. (1) Put another person in the job for a while. (2) Continue to pay the grieving person while not charging them paid time off. Those things cost money. Some organizations have the money to afford such. Some organizations don’t.

If an organization is going to allow grieving, pay for it. No excuses. No, “Hey, please consider the situation and do more than you are required and continue to do more for a long time because we the managers won’t do our jobs.”

Bad things happen. Managing the work when bad things happen isn’t easy. It is, however, something managers are paid to do. Let’s do better.