I read an article in the New Zealand Herald about a senior New Zealand lawyer who reportedly told her junior staff they didn’t need sick days, because theirs wasn’t a physical job. When one of them reported a high fever, she apparently suggested it was psychosomatic. You may have seen it. It was a wild ride.
I found this interesting on several fronts but let me choose just two, both of which are things I’ve heard over the years, and both of which are wrong.
What the Act actually says
Here’s the unarguable bit for context. At least, I think it’s unarguable. Note, I’m not a lawyer or HR expert, so I’ve just lifted this from the Holidays Act and done what anyone would do, and read it.
Section 65 of the Holidays Act 2003 says an employee may take sick leave if the employee is sick or injured, or their partner is, or someone who depends on them for care is. Section 63 sets out who qualifies, on length of service and hours worked. Two questions then: How long have you been here, and are you sick.
Neither provision mentions what the job involves. The minimum is ten days a year, doubled from five in July 2021, and section 6 stops an employer contracting below the minimum. Sick leave is a provision for being ill. There’s no physical-labour test in the Act because there was never meant to be one.
Now the interesting part.
That word
The second claim is the one that irritates me more.
A fever is a sign, not a symptom. A symptom is what the patient reports. A sign is what somebody else can measure. There’s no diagnostic manual and no clinical tradition anywhere under which a thermometer reading is a psychological event.
And psychosomatic stopped meaning ‘not really ill’ more than a decade ago. Our two main classification systems (DSM and ICD) dropped the premise that these symptoms lack a physical basis. Burton and colleagues record that shift in BMC Medicine, including why the older term was abandoned. It was almost always used about patients rather than with them. That’s a pivotal observation, and I think that inference applies here too.
So the word was wrong. The intent behind it was the bigger problem.
Sitting down doesn’t mean rest
Plenty of reasonable people get this wrong, including people who’d never say anything as seemingly daft as the fever line. I excuse sleep-deprived parents from this question entirely. I said several thousand daft things when that was me.
Norman Mackworth put radar operators in front of a clock with a jumping hand in 1948 and watched their detection rate fall away inside half an hour. That finding has been replicated ever since. What came later makes it worse.
See and colleagues pooled 138 experimental conditions from 42 studies and found that what degrades isn’t only whether people report what they’ve seen. It’s their ability to tell a signal from a non-signal at all. In their own words, a discrimination that starts out moderately easy for an alert observer can become moderately difficult by the end of the watch.
The sensitivity decline they report is an average across conditions that differ enormously. How large that decline is varies enormously between studies, and in about one condition in ten sensitivity held steady or improved instead. What changed it was the task, the rate events arrived at, and whether someone is watching for a change in a physical signal or reading symbols on a screen. Watch length made no difference to the size of the decline, which suggests the loss happens early rather than building across a long shift. In sum, conditions can vary the decline, but the decline is real and measurable.
It also isn’t boredom and it isn’t attitude. Warm, Parasuraman and Matthews reviewed the field under the title “Vigilance requires hard mental work and is stressful”, which is about as delightfully plain as you’ll ever see for an academic title. People rate watchkeeping as demanding while they’re doing it. Their performance falls anyway.
Worth saying again. Vigilance is effortful and stressful.
Reviewing, drafting, monitoring and advising, as junior lawyers would have to do, all sit in that category. They’re tiring. Yes, it’s a different mechanism from lifting things or general physical labour. Also yes, there’s the same need for recovery.
What a manager does with this
- Design the work. A billable-hour target a second-year can only reach by skipping the checking is a performance standard dressed up as a performance standard. Somebody’s willingness to keep going tells you about their character. It tells you nothing about their remaining capacity, nor what it’s costing them.
- The question isn’t whether your people are tired at six. It’s whether the advice they give at 6pm is as good as the advice they gave at 10am, and whether anyone in the building would be in a position to notice if it wasn’t. This would apply to other cognitively demanding work.
- If judgment is the product you need (or complex problem-solving and decision-making under pressure) the conditions for judgment belong in the operating model rather than in a wellbeing programme. Sadly, I usually see it filed under the wellbeing heading, with inability to maintain “resilience” or “wellbeing” seen as a personal failure rather than and situational issue. Sort of like this legal firm.
- Sustained concentration is load. Watchkeeping, reviewing, monitoring and drafting all produce measurable decline over time on task, which is why other industries build mandatory breaks into the roster rather than simply offering them. If your operating model assumes a lawyer can hold quality across seven and a half chargeable hours I would argue your model is wrong.
Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash