It’s crystal clear – the paperwork says the employee is ready to go back to work.
HR closed the case, the doctor signed off, and it’s simple. But then that same person comes back to work with a neck pillow. They used to run to meetings, but now they have to calculate how to get from point A to point B because they can only stand for 10 minutes max. Are they truly ready to go back to work?
The problem is that the world treats recovery like a light switch. One day you’re out, the next day you’re 100% recovered.
However, if you know anything about recovery, you know that it’s anything but simple and, most of the time, it doesn’t go in a straight, predictable line.
When the Role No Longer Works for the Employee
No job is truly flexible because employees are expected to perform in a certain way and get certain results. There are deadlines to be made and calls to make, so even though the contract might say ‘flexible working hours,’ the job itself is still fixed to a point.
That means that when someone gets injured and is forced to take time off, the job that they come back to doesn’t necessarily allow them to adjust. And if the employee isn’t completely recovered, the whole thing gets that much harder.
The job is still the same, but the person doing it isn’t.
That simply has to cause problems because how could it not?
What ends up happening is that deadlines start to slip. And then? Well, the rest of the staff needs to pick up the slack.
In the meantime, the employee is really trying/doing their best. Regardless, they have that never-ending feeling as if they’re constantly falling behind, regardless of how fast they’re working or how many hours they’re putting into it.
Not only that, but they also feel guilty about their colleagues having to do more than usual because they’re not feeling well.
From the company’s standpoint, the only thing to do in a situation like this is to resort to short-term fixes.
So if the meeting happens every morning, they might decide to skip it. The issue still remains, though, because the role doesn’t change for that one employee. Their job is still very much the same. As a result of all this mess comes an even bigger mess because what was supposed to be a temporary fix becomes permanent, regardless of the fact that it can’t work in the long run.
In some cases, the employee can’t ever fully come back to their job, and the only fix here is to think about disability damages. If that’s the reality, however, then you can no longer ask how to fix the situation, but what to do if the fix doesn’t exist.
What Happens Inside Teams Over Time
Temporary fixes have a way of becoming permanent, even when they’re not ideal.
Let’s see how teams react to that.
Tasks Get Quietly Shifted
There’s no formal way in which people find out about the change, not even an email.
It’s just… Well, it just happens.
Employee B notices that quarterly reports that ALWAYS used to come to their desk are going to Employee B, and that’s simply how things work now. It may have started out as ‘just for now,’ but after a few weeks, it’s the new normal.
And now someone who used to handle that task is in this weird place where they don’t know if they’re supposed to ask for it back or just sit and shut up.
Roles Change, But Nobody Says Anything
The titles don’t change, but job descriptions do.
The employee who got back from sick leave looks at their calendar and sees less of everything; fewer meetings, fewer projects, like they’re smaller now. And it’s not like anyone told them it’s going to be like this, so they had the time to prepare.
They were just quietly moved aside, and the employee most likely won’t ask why.
People Slowly Check Out
All of a sudden, expectations are lower.
Everyone knows the person is still on the mend, so they try to ease the load. But even after the recovery fully passes, the team is so used to doing things the way they’ve been doing it for the past few weeks that nobody ever thinks to change anything.
So that one employee stops trying, and little by little, they check out until they eventually quit and leave.
The Rest of the Team Feels It, Too
Everyone is watching this go on, and after a while, they can’t help but ask questions. Why do they have to do more work? Why are they covering for someone else if they’re not getting the credit for it? Will someone pick up their slack if they go on sick leave?
Managers shrug it all off because they truly don’t have any answers to these questions.
Conclusion
The thing that you should be telling the employees is that, once they go on leave and come back, things might look different. Not necessarily ‘bad different,’ but still different. And once they’re back, perhaps HR and managers should think about tweaking their roles, at least for a while, until they’re 100% back on their feet.
Because, as you can clearly see, burying your head in the sand and going after quick fixes doesn’t do anyone any good.
Guest write
