So I am a private business owner, live in a town of 1,000 people. Today I had my first employee “tell me” they not coming to work until this calms down. Said employee is in full out freak mode but claims they can get the work done from home, while I am of the opinion they won’t get a damn thing done other than watch the news and panic more. Should I tell employee they should take a sabbatical if they don’t want to come in, as we are in a small company and less than 10 in office and I don’t believe we are at a high risk. They are good worker, but have lost mind over this, don’t want to lose them but don’t think I should pay someone to sit at home and “work”. Definitely trying to be understanding but also know I can’t afford large drop in productivity while paying same salary. Any opinions?
Totally see your side and totally see your employee's side. Both are plausible.
Others have had good suggestions with having a trial period. But I also echo that good employees are good employees. I believe we will start seeing a transition to flexibility to work from home more and more. Now there are obviously some jobs that you don't have a choice, you have to be there in person - bank teller, retail, construction, etc. Obviously those are different.
I work from home when I'm not travelling for work. It's awesome and I get 10 times more work done being at home compared to my last job when I had to go into an office everyday. As I began to type this response, I thought I may contradict my entire argument since I'm spending time on SPS rather than working since it's 11:30 am my time. But it actually illustrates my point further. My work trusts that I will do my job (measurable by KPI's) regardless of when I start, when I finish, and the time it took to me to do said job. They simply do not care as long as I get the job done. That means sometimes I wake up at 5 am to get on an international call, or put my toddler down for bed and knock out some more work that night from 8pm to 11pm, and anything in between.
There's some give and take. To give you an example (and by no means am I implying that you do this) in my previous job, I could've done entirely at home but management made everyone come in at 8 and work was over at 5. Didn't matter who you were. I consistently came in at 7 am (before anybody else got there) and left around 6 pm (after everybody left) for a year or two straight (Everybody included all senior execs). Usually ate lunch at my desk and kept working through my allotted lunch hour. One day I went to eat lunch with a friend. Lasted a little bit longer than an hour. Probably an hour and a half or so. Got back to the office and was immediately questioned by my boss why I took longer than hour to eat lunch and that's not policy here. I professionally cited that I usually put more hours in that's required so I figured there would be some flexibility. Nope. Additionally/later that year, I got the same raise and bonus as everyone in the 120 employee company at the end of the year, etc. Even had numbers to show I brought in a few million dollars they otherwise weren't even expecting out of me. After all that I just had a hard time justifying coming in early, staying late, answer emails from my phone in the evening, etc.
Now the above experience may make me an "entitled millennial" but when there are company's out there such as my current one that give me flexibility and reward valuable hard work, it's hard to stay at the companies that are set in their ways because "that's what they had to do when they were my age" or whatever the reason may be. I want to reiterate that I am not implying you have these same values or treat your employees this way. More-so to illustrate how stuff like that doesn't motivate employees to go the extra mile.
Lastly, on the flip-side there are times where you can't beat face to face interaction. My company has an office in Atlanta that I go and visit once a month or so for a few days. Completely worth it as we can interact face to face and really put in some good work that would otherwise be hard virtually.
