Saturday, August 29, 2009

Perfect attendance

Financial Times:

Younger workers are more likely to take sick leave than their older colleagues, and those in their 60s have the best attendance levels.

Mike Emmott, policy adviser at the [Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development], said that, in spite of them entering the workforce with high expectations, something seems to go wrong with this younger age group.

“They can be quite bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when they start work,” he said. “But that enthusiasm rapidly falls off a cliff after a year or two.”

Mr Emmott speculated that younger workers either had unrealistic expectations of the workplace, or were losing faith in their employers when they did not deliver on promises made when they were hired.


Younger workers take sick leave; older workers take antidepressants!

1 comment:

RJMeyers said...

Well, that certainly described me. My first job out of college was working as a Systems Engineer--pretty cushy and well paid for an entry-level position. But dear god did the workplace environment start to depress me. The first year or so went ok, but by the second year I was depressed and seeing a therapist. No pills prescribed to me, but I eventually left my job and went back to grad school at about the two year mark.

I'm not surprised that young workers take more absences. They have not been sufficiently broken in by the system yet, unlike their older peers who tend to just accept the routine garbage, bureaucracy, boredom, and bullshit that comes with most jobs.