Is that employee really ill?

Busi­ness Week has a good arti­cle about elec­tronic mon­i­tor­ing and employee absen­teeism. There are more IS-related tools that sup­port absence man­age­ment.

Some com­pa­nies give their employ­ees flex­i­ble poli­cies, like IBM. At other firms like Best Buy, out­put mat­ters as much or more than hours worked.

Some orga­ni­za­tions give employ­ees a sin­gle pot of hours to address sick time and vaca­tion time. It’s up to the employee to man­age this stash in a rea­son­able manner.

Bad things hap­pen every day, and usu­ally with­out respect for anyone’s schedule.

Some of this dis­cus­sion seems applic­a­ble to absen­teeism in the class­room. Instruc­tors often speak of stu­dents who feigned an ill­ness, a hard drive crash, or a pro­fes­sional cri­sis as an assign­ment came due. I usu­ally take stu­dents at their word, unless I find out oth­er­wise. Most grad­u­ate stu­dents want to do the right thing.

On the other hand, I’ve heard of instruc­tors who have feigned ill­ness, per­sonal crises, tech­nol­ogy prob­lems or a dead­line as an excuse for ungraded papers, sloppy lec­tures or missed appointments.

It’s dif­fi­cult for instruc­tors when some­thing goes wrong.

When I was an MBA stu­dent, my orga­ni­za­tional behav­ior pro­fes­sor graded one of our paper assign­ments dur­ing a flight – and he then left the graded papers on the plane, with­out record­ing the grades. All but one of my stu­dents could reprint their papers from a floppy disk and resub­mit the assign­ment for a new grade. The stu­dent who handed in a type­writ­ten paper, and didn’t have a backup copy to resub­mit, got a C, as I recall.

The fol­low­ing year, our adver­tis­ing pro­fes­sor died a week before our final pre­sen­ta­tions. It was a very good course, but we were all sur­prised and sad when we heard what had hap­pened. The assis­tant dean came in to watch and grade our groups.

I always build some slack time into my course sched­ules, so I can com­pen­sate when it’s necessary.

Of course, ris­ing expec­ta­tions has some­thing to do with all of this, too. We expect other peo­ple to be avail­able on email or mobile phone when we call.

Tagged as: ethics, management, MBA, monitoring, student, teaching, university