We're taking a bit of a breather while the world rearranges its underpants. Meanwhile, the other blog is here.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

The cat's got the measles

Back from a compulsory corporate audit workshop on sickness monitoring, imposed because the Library Service is now the sick man of Helminthdale.

Front-line services like social services, one-stop-shops and libraries tend to have worse records than do corporate support services because they're subject to whatever human pathogens the customers bring along with them, which then get shared around the building.

Our toxic management regime and long-standing policy of leaving vacancies to mature a few years before filling them doesn't help any as far as stress-related illness is concerned.

It turns out that another factor is our disproportionately high number of part-time and job-share workers. If somebody who works two days (15 hours) a week is off sick for both days the council takes that as being a full week (37½ hours) lost. Better still, if two people jobshare 37½ hours between them and both are off sick at the same time it is taken that we have lost 75 hours' work.

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