Week 15

This week I want to talk about Disney's attendance policy. Employees don't get a set number of sick days to use throughout the year like many other companies use. Instead, if you call in, sick or otherwise, you get a point on your record card. If you have 3 points in 30 days, or 6 points in 60 days, or 9 points in 90 days you get a reprimand. Five reprimands in  a year and you can be terminated. Other ways to earn points, full point or half a point, is to clock in late, forget to clock out, or have a no call/no show.

Even if you are legitimately sick, with a doctor's note, you still get a point on your record card. The only exception is that if you miss 3 days in a row due to being ill if you bring in a doctor's note to health services they will merge the 3points into a single point on your record card. You can only do this once every six months.

When I first heard of this policy I didn't agree with it. I felt that it penalized you even if you really were sick. I thought that it encouraged people to come into work even if they were ill and that just helps spread germs and sickness. However, after taking a harder look at it and seeing just how many days/time you need to miss in order to actually be in danger of losing your job, it doesn't seem like too bad of a policy. It just tends to gnaw at those, like me, who are a little OCD about points on their record cards. 

I can see why Disney uses this policy though. With 60,000 employees there needs to be a system in place to keep tabs on employees' attendance. This points system is easy for anyone to look up, employer and employee, and easy to see where the employee stands and their attendance history. The only other system I could come up with that would work would be to give each employee X amount of sick days for the year for the employee to use as they see fit. From an employee stand point this would be good because we would not have to worry about our record being affected by us calling in sick. However, looking at it from Disney's point of view, they might see a problem with this because it may give people incentive to just call in sick to use up their days even if they are not actually sick. This could present a problem for Disney on the busy holidays such as Christmas, New Years, Easter, and Thanksgiving, where employees might just call in so they can spend the day with their families.