Let’s work from home when the kids are sick, thank you great company that I am allowed to slave away for you while taking care of my sick kid! It isn’t even a US company it seems.
Edit: guess I should have posted to unpopularopinions instead!
I just wanted to add I cut off the photo of the person on purpose. She is posting that with her sick child in her lap and that photo has been taken by some other person, not a selfie. If you are not feeling that the content of the post is bad, you hopefully still agree that presenting your sick child in an almost professionally looking photo to the world for LinkedIn clout is not great.
Raving about working aside, what’s wrong with this? Kids get sick a lot and you definitely need 2 jobs to comfortably pay for them these days.
Loads of my coworkers work an extra day from home when their kids are sick and it works great. I’d say it’s probably one of the best reasons to work from home.
Edit: I work from home about 2-3 of my 4 work days. I only go to the office to see my coworkers voluntarily or for the physical meetings. I would not wish forced full time in person days for people who can work from home.
I think the problem is that it should be standard, but the LinkedIn poster is talking about it like her company is SO generous.
Yes and no. Multiple things are the problem.
1st - what you said, this shouldn’t be a thing worth highlighting and its sad it is
2nd - just the usual online clout generating using your sick child. The image below is the poster with her sick daughter in her lap, I cut it off on purpose. I get it, images are more powerful than words but using your child for online clout is a hard no for me, triple that when your child is sick
3rd - the image is taken by another person. Often you see this sort of post with the person taking a clear selfie, here its almost a professional quality photoshoot type of picture, I know its still probably just a mobile phone though, not saying they hired a photographer for this. So who is that person? I’d hope the dad, but why is that person there able to take that picture but not taking care of the child. Sure, maybe same situation, working from home to also take care of the child and they take turns. But then that’s a bit dishonest not to mention you are sharing responsibility but instead celebrate yourself as an awesome “working mom”
4th - if the dad is also home, why can he not maybe even take care of the child alone?
5th - just like how sick leave should be normal, having leave to take care of your children should be the norm too. I know I am having a privileged perspective here, I live in a Scandinavian country where we have such a “taking care of sick children” leave. And its great! So yeah, if you don’t live in a country like that, you look at this and feel like its not so bad, from my perspective it is
Just to comment on your first point, while in Utopia it wouldn’t be worth mentioning, the fact that not every companys job listing even includes home office, that makes it not just worth mentioning, but means it needs to be highlighted. People look for jobs that allow some or full time home office (for whatever reasons, or in general). How are they supposed to find them if it’s not mentioned anywhere?
The simple fact that we aren’t at the point where everyone has access to this kind of work environment MINIMUM completely defeats point 1. If you ever want to get to the point where this isn’t worth highlighting, it has to be ubiquitous, otherwise it is absolutely a highlight.
If no one in the city has access to water, suddenly a job offering water is a huge highlight.
If you want to make these practices not a highlight anymore, you have to make it ubiquitous, and the only way to do that is by spreading the idea. Is it perfect? Nope. But move the bar a bit more, and then it actually won’t be worth mentioning anymore, and we can mention the next small step.
For me the issue is that this is presented as a great thing that only hybrid offers. But it is the thing that full remote offers, too. And you’re quite lucky to WFH 3/4 work days (also to have a 4-day work week, I guess, if that’s so I’m really glad at least someone has it already)
My company doesn’t enforce office at all, it’s just a measly 40 working days per quarter that we are required to come to the office. I agree that it makes sense to see each other in person every now and then, it’s just the way it’s done doesn’t really encourage planning to gather a team at the same location, just ticking the checkboxes
My company is so generous that they’re letting me work from home while my baby is sick. I’m so glad I work for a company that cares. That’s why when people ask me why I don’t just take the day off to care for my sick infant, I tell them I can’t afford to take that many vacation days.