can I use a wedding photo as my work avatar, I sneeze constantly, and more

by Alison Green on February 6, 2025

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Can I use a wedding photo — with a veil — as my work avatar?

My company is fully remote, so they really encourage us to upload a headshot to our company chat service so people can put a face to the name.

Would it look out of touch or immature to use a photo from my wedding? It’s probably the best I’ll ever look in any photo because of the professional hair and makeup and because it was taken by a professional photographer. But because of the veil, it’s very obviously a wedding photo. (I’d choose a shot without my husband in it.)

I think some of my male coworkers have done this, but it feels different because they’re just wearing suits rather than the whole Bridal Outfit ™.

Yeah, a wedding veil will look out of place for a headshot.

For most companies, at least. There are undoubtedly exceptions, but we’re trafficking in generalities for questions like this.

(I totally understand the temptation to use it though and feel the same way about my wedding photos, and in hindsight everyone who’s just had their hair and makeup done for their wedding should consider taking a couple of shots with no obviously wedding-ish accoutrements while they are looking like that.)

2. I sneeze constantly, and my coworkers say “bless you” Every. Single. Time

I sneeze. A lot. Like, when I sneeze, I sneeze six times in a row and I do this multiple times a day. Even with regular visits to an allergist and daily medication, it’s something I have to deal with.

My issue is that I work in a huge open-concept office. Every time I sneeze, I’m greeted with a chorus of “Bless you!” from around the office. Putting aside the fact that I have no concerns about my soul escaping via my nose, it’s just annoying. If I sneeze six times, they’ll say “bless you!” six times.

I’ve tried to jokingly tell people that I’m okay, to just ignore me, or to at least wait until I’ve finished, but several people still do it. I already worry that I’m creating a disruption, but my sneezing isn’t something I can control. How do I get these well-intentioned colleagues to stop?

You might not be able to; some people feel too rude letting a sneeze go unacknowledged. But you can try! The thing is, you’ve got to stop saying it jokingly and start saying it more seriously: “I appreciate the thought, but it’s making it more of a disruption than it already is. I’d be grateful to agree there’s a blanket ‘bless you’ in effect and no more are needed.” If saying it to the group doesn’t work, start talking to the hold-out’s one-on-one.

3. What is the normal amount of extra staffing a team should plan for?

I work in a support role on a team which physically moves objects, devices, and equipment around. No working from home!

A normal complement of staff to cover the needs on a normal day is six people. But there are only six people, total, employed on my team.

If even one team member calls in sick or goes on holiday or on a training course, the team is short-staffed. This causes friction and delays and impacts the work of the whole place. I feel that management is in denial and expects us to just do our best and work harder.

Is there a number which any sensible manager applies to a situation like this? Should a six-position team have a complement of say nine staff? Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s at least seven, right?

Not really. It’s actually very normal for a team with a six-person workload to be staffed by six people. Well-resourced and well-managed organizations might staff it with seven, but you’d be hard-pressed to find an organization that could justify overstaffing by 50% (nine staff).

It absolutely does make sense to build in a buffer for times when people are out or when work is higher, but it can be a very hard sell and it’s common for managers not to be able to get the budget for it. Ideally you’d build in an additional staff position that does other useful work when they’re not needed to cover for someone, but there isn’t always enough other work to justify the additional position, or it’s not high-priority enough relative to other things that money could be spent on.

That said, a decently managed place will recognize the situation and manage workflow accordingly — meaning that when someone is out, they’ll adjust the workload, reprioritize as needed, push back on demands from other teams, bring in temp help, and so forth. It’s when that doesn’t happen that it really becomes a problem.

4. Telling an employer I’ll need time off to promote a book

This is still a hypothetical, but I want to be prepared to navigate the situation. I have a book being released by a major publisher this year. It’s beyond exciting, and I am contractually obligated to do any and all promotional activities asked of me.

However, I won’t see any more money from my publisher until I earn out my advance, and I need a job. I just concluded a second interview for a really fantastic position. If I get an offer, I know my obligations to my publisher have to be an immediate discussion with my supervisor.

How would I navigate this without getting my offer pulled? “I’m delighted to accept this rigorous and team-work based role but also I might be on a book tour lol” is not really the note I want to strike, you know?

Well, first, look at your contract with your publisher — it’s very unlikely that you are contractually obligated to do “any and all” promotional activities asked of you. You’re typically expected to do a lot of them, even most of them, but that doesn’t mean you can never push back and have a conflict with something. You should also talk to your publisher about exactly what it’s likely to look like; book tours are less and less common these days, unless the author has a massive audience (or in some cases unless the author is highly motivated to do one). It’s possible you’ve already discussed this with your publisher and know for sure they expect a book tour, but either way, talk to them and get really clear on what promotion is likely to look like and how much flexibility you’ll have. (For most authors, it’s likely to be a lot of demands on your time the month the book comes out — although keep in mind a lot of it will be interviews that you will do remotely — and then decreasing demands on your time after that.)

Once you have that discussion, you’ll be in a better position to talk to a would-be employer about it since they’ll need to hear specifics of what you’re asking them to agree to. Ideally you can say something like, “I have a book being published by Oatmeal Press in June and will need time for promotional activities that month, including being at the Groats fan convention on June 20 and away for a signing event on June 30 and general availability for interviews around the time of publication.” You won’t be able to predict everything that will come up (and media stuff in particular can come up last minute), but talking to your publisher should position you to be able to provide a general idea of what it will look like.

Congratulations on the book!

5. I work for the federal government — how can I stay in touch with coworkers?

I have worked for the federal government for over 15 years — almost all of my professional references are federal employees and I only have their official contact information. In the event of a mass layoff or other mass exodus of employees from the government, how should we handle reference checks for future employment? I have the personal contact info for 3-4 people who would provide relevant info (not just “we were neighbors and played volleyball on Tuesdays” or “we worked together a decade ago”), but if I had to provide a list of more people, or those who fit a certain description, I’d be in trouble if I couldn’t look people up. I have no expectation of any privacy related to official communication channels right now.

This might seem like I’m overthinking or focusing on a relatively minor issue while everything is falling apart, but, due to health concerns, I’m terrified of losing my health insurance and need to be able to find new work ASAP if I somehow find myself unemployed. The only thing that’s keeping me going right now is figuring out how to get as many ducks in a row as possible.

LinkedIn is the easiest way to keep in touch with people after you’re no longer working together. You don’t need to be active on LinkedIn to use it this way; you just need to connect to colleagues and other contacts so you can find each other in the future. So if you’re not already connected there, do that right away. There’s also nothing wrong with saying to people, “With everything going on, I want to make sure we can stay in touch if anything changes. My personal email address is X and I’d love to have yours as well if you’re comfortable exchanging it.”

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{ 45 comments }

{ 45 comments… read them below or add one }

  1. Viki*

    1) I feel you. Did I make my mom take a photo of me against a white wall with prom make up on so I could use it for my student ID for undergrad and grad school? Yes, yes I did.

    Do I think the veil makes it harder to keep professionalism as a head shot, yes. Though trust me, I also want to do that.

    Reply ↓
    1. Seeking Second Childhood*

      An off the shoulders is also problematic. I saw one user icon that auto-cropped in a way that showed *no dress at all*.

      And for the record I think tux shots with boutonieres look out of place too.

      Reply ↓
  2. AllergiesSuck*

    Fellow constant sneeze and cougher here. Folks I work with regularly just ignore it. I would be annoyed beyond all get out with the bless yous. Even one each time would be too much. My biggest problem is when folks on one time/infrequent calls try to insist on rescheduling because I’m sick.

    Reply ↓
    1. Annie*

      I learned my co-worker’s sneeze patterns. Often he’d sneeze twice, and then wait a few beats, and then sneeze one final time. Then I would offer the “bless you.” I definitely wouldn’t do it six times (except maybe the first time, jokingly).

      Reply ↓
    2. allathian*

      Just as long as they don’t go the French route:

      First sneeze: à vos/tes souhaits (roughly equivalent to “bless you” or “good wishes,” or “to your health” the pronoun depends on whether you use formal or informal address with the person)
      Second sneeze: à vos/tes amours (“to your loves”)
      Third sneeze, several options:
      – et qu’elles/qu’ils durent toujours – “and may they last forever”
      – que les tiennes / vôtres durent toujours – “may yours last forever”
      – avec un grand A et beaucoup de s – “with a capital A and many an s”
      – et à tes enfants / et à vos enfants – “and to your children”
      – et à ton argent / et à votre argent – “and to your money”

      Credit to Lawless French, link in a follow-up comment.

      And I agree with you on allergies, sneezing season’s here, too.

      Reply ↓
    3. Weaponized Pumpkin*

      I do my best to discourage bless-yous, because I am an epic sneezer. (It runs in my family.) Not just 3 or 6 — it could be 20 or more. It goes on and on! And it SUCKS. Extra commentary and blessings (from a god i don’t believe in) only make it more uncomfortable. If they really feel the need to say something, I let them know that one blessing is more than enough to cover the whole fit, but honestly wish they’d just ignore me.

      Reply ↓
  3. AnotherSarah*

    For OP4 (book tour): My sense (from my discussions with my publisher as well as with friends who have done a lot of promotion on their books) is that a “book tour” is often something like a week of promotional stops without coming home, and after (or before!) that, a few events closer to home and often on weekends. Like if you live in the mid-Atlantic, you might have a whirlwind week in the Midwest and West Coast, but after that, it’s a weekend in New England, a weekend in the South, etc. It’s still a lot, of course, and a company might not be okay with it, but it’s not like touring with a band for weeks/months.

    Reply ↓
    1. lyonite*

      And even that is optimistic! Unless you’re a Big Deal, you’re going to be organizing and paying for any book tour yourself, which in practical terms means mostly stops in your area, and generally on evenings and weekends. (Source: I am a traditionally published author, and have many author friends.) And, honestly, doing much more doesn’t make a lot of sense–bookstore events don’t sell many books, unless you’re popular enough not to need them. If you have reason to think your situation may be different, your agent can help you navigate the requirements, and should be able to run interference with your publisher if they ask for something that doesn’t work for you.

      Reply ↓
    2. Not Australian*

      ‘Virtual book tours’ are also a thing these days: they still require a time commitment, but less travelling. They usually require little more than an online Q&A and a few giveaways for each ‘stop’.

      Reply ↓
  4. Cmdrshprd*

    OP3 when you say “This causes friction and delays and impacts the work of the whole place.”

    If the situation is that some moves take longer while people are out, it’s seems like that is a reasonable expectation. Just because people are upset about something their moves taking a day or a few days longer (internal customers/clients) does not mean it is an actual problem that is worth or needs solving.

    I get that it sucks to be the person likely receiving the complaints, I would suggest that you can try to redirect them to management, but a lot of times people will find something to complain about. I would try not to take it personally.

    Especially if people on your team still call out sick as need and take PTO.

    you can try to have a stock saying, “yes it sucks this is taking longer than you want but we are doing our best.” repeat adnauseum.

    Reply ↓
    1. Metal Gru*

      I’ve been wondering about this for a while: if people are out (like in LW’s case) and desk moves will take longer or whatever the delay is – is it “unprofessional” to say something like “due to short staffing today it will take longer”, “we are closed today due to sickness absence”, etc? I feel like it could be, because it’s attributing the cause to the person who’s out rather than due to lean staffing. I have the same issue sometimes and try to avoid saying something like “we’re short staffed” but rather the amount of urgent work we have is higher than we can accommodate in the usual time frames etc.. Is this a “correct” approach?

      Reply ↓
      1. TechWorker*

        Personally I don’t think it’s unprofessional, *especially* if your clients are internal which it sounds like they are for this LW. I also wouldn’t view saying ‘we’re understaffed today so please be patient’ as blaming it on the person who’s out, you are being accurate about the problem. If it’s REALLY a problem then making people know that also helps – if the complaints turn into ‘there’s not enough resource on team X it slows my team down which has impact Y,Z’ that may be the push the company needs to add more staff.

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      2. Nebula*

        Personally, I think being upfront about being short-staffed due to sickness absence is the better approach. If I’m the person who needs something done ‘The amount of urgent work we have is higher than we can accommodate’ etc etc (which happens to be along the lines of an automated message I received yesterday in response to a helpdesk request) is kind of annoying because it’s just like, OK you don’t have any capacity to cope with being busier than usual? Which, to be clear, is an issue I would attribute to management not hiring enough staff or something rather than the people actually dealing with my request. But if I had received a message saying ‘We’re short-staffed due to sickness absence’ well now I know that this can’t be helped, since people get sick and it’s no one’s fault. It also means I know that this is an acute issue rather than a chronic one (leaving aside the question of whether the team should have more staff in the first place).

        This actually reminds me of an article I read recently about language guidelines given to railway staff here in the UK. Apparently there’s an emphasis on person-focused language (so using second person ‘you’ instead of saying ‘passengers’ or ‘customers’), and on being specific and honest about any issues, using natural language. There was an example scenario of all trains from a station being cancelled because of a tree falling on the line. Instead of having an announcement saying e.g. ‘Services this evening are cancelled due to recent storm events. We apologise for any inconvenience’ the handbook encourages something more like ‘We’re really sorry but we’ve had to cancel all the trains for the next few hours as a tree has fallen on the line just outside the station, and it will take some time to clear.’ The latter is less ‘professional’ but more useful.

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  5. Mockingbird*

    LW5, LinkedIn is good, but get personal emails for everyone as well. My best professional reference died, his backup offered to be a reference. Great, except he’s now retired and has never replied to the message I sent him on LinkedIn. My second best reference has changed jobs and even the personal email i had for her isn’t working.

    It’s also good to build a network in the situation you’re in. Just remember to keep personal communication to devices you own, transfer any contacts you need now, backup all important data to your personal devices, and wipe any and all personal data off any device you don’t own.

    Reply ↓
    1. Free Meerkats*

      All the yesses to this. I was barely on LinkedIn when I was working. Now that I’ve been retired for almost 2 years (has it really been that long?), I’m not even sure Id remember my login info if I tried to log into it.

      Reply ↓
  6. Honey cocoa*

    OP1Do you know anyone who’s really good at photo editing? Like maybe your wedding photographer? If it’s just edit out the veil, maybe someone could do that for you – or maybe you could do that. Might be worth a try!

    Reply ↓
      1. March*

        Not a good one, and definitely not one that won’t use up the amount of water and energy that an entire city uses in a month.

        Reply ↓
        1. Spooz*

          Serious question, because I am hearing more and more about how much water and energy AI uses:

          If it uses up this much resources for each task, how come it’s free?

          It doesn’t really make sense to me that companies would not charge for this if it is so costly for them. What am I missing here?

          (NB: I experimented with ChatGPT a few times and with an AI image creator once to see what they were like but am not a habitual current user of AI.)

          Reply ↓
          1. bamcheeks*

            Tons of venture capital funding in the hope that it will turn into something profitable eventually— that’s the model that most digital development has. Most of the big digital companies had a few years of being unprofitable for years before they figured out how to make money from what they were doing.

            And capitalism REALLY isn’t set up to preserve resources. It’s totally fine with capitalism if a product eats up water/air/energy etc as long as it looks like it’ll make someone lots of money eventually.

            Reply ↓
            1. Spooz*

              “And capitalism REALLY isn’t set up to preserve resources. It’s totally fine with capitalism if a product eats up water/air/energy etc as long as it looks like it’ll make someone lots of money eventually.”

              That’s kind of what I’m getting at. The water and energy ISN’T free to the AI company. It costs them money. So why would they not charge for something which costs them money?

              I guess it makes sense that they’re regarding that money as an investment that will one day rake in the big bucks. I’ve not seen anything about advertising on AI, but maybe this is what we should expect soon, a la Facebook and YouTube.

              Reply ↓
              1. Falling Diphthong*

                They are not charging because they think they can create a demand and then a way to make money will materialize.

                It is very bizarre, and reminds me a bit of the suggestion that the stock market has gone up because people with a lot of money needed to put it somewhere.

                Reply ↓
          2. TechWorker*

            Training is hugely expensive, once the model exists I don’t have precise numbers but it is clearly not huge amounts per task. At some point I would expect it to get more expensive to use though (& note lots of companies are already charging businesses to use AI).

            Reply ↓
            1. TechWorker*

              From Google running a model once trained costs from ‘a few cents’ to ‘about a dollar’ depending on the hardware and complexity of the model. Still more than you might expect for something ‘free’. But then Instagram and YouTube streaming endless video content is also clearly not free either (paid for via advertising).

              Reply ↓
            2. amoeba*

              Yeah, like, using an AI tool *once* certainly doesn’t use up anything remotely close to “the amount of water and energy that an entire city uses in a month”? Like, yes, AI definitely has downsides, but that kind of exaggeration really doesn’t help the debate.

              Quickly googled and found that if one out of 10 working Americans used GPT-4 once a week for a year, *that* would equal the electricity consumed by all households in Washington DC. Which is still a lot, for sure! But a tool that used that much for *a single query* just… couldn’t exist.

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    2. WS*

      I was going to say this too! One of my co-workers is also a wedding photographer and has done pretty good photoshopping jobs on various wedding photos for various reasons (the worst being that the groom’s brother went to jail for something really awful and they could no longer look at the photos with him in them).

      Reply ↓
  7. An American(ish) Werewolf in London(ish)*

    I too am a multiple sneezer – I sneeze like a cat (little, tiny ‘tschews’ – usually 7). It’s less relevant at the moment as I’m mostly WFH, but yeah, I have often said, ‘yeah, just wait til I’m finished.’ People do tend to find my tiny cat sneezes amusing, and, in truth, it doesn’t really bother me – I’ve been living with this since I was a child (my 12th grade maths teacher would jokingly get annoyed if I didn’t sneeze exactly 7 times at 10.15 as it would ‘throw out our timing’; my dad said he could always find my mother or me in a crowd by waiting until we sneezed) and it really doesn’t bother me.

    But that’s me – I can see that it could get real old, real fast. I don’t have much useful advice (except for the lighthearted ‘yeah, I’d wait until I were done if I were you’) but fellow multiple sneezer sends her solidarity.

    Reply ↓
  8. ThePeanutGallery*

    Re: book tours. It’s (now) very rare for publishers to pay for authors to go on tour, although my in-house publicist is always happy to set up bookstore events for me if I pay my own travel expenses. There is an occasional exception but the only authors I know who travel extensively do school visits, which is an entirely different conversation.

    (I say this as someone with six books published by major houses, with three more under contract.)

    Launch week can weirdly anticlimactic. Try to carve out time to sign stock at your local bookstore(s) if they’ve decided to carry your book. And find a way to celebrate with a few close friends or even by yourself. (Sitting down with your book, a cup of coffee, and a pastry, and taking a moment to say “I did it” can be a quiet highlight of your release day.)

    Reply ↓
  9. Ellis Bell*

    I feel like the answer to 3, depends a lot on what the reduced workflow output looks like on one of the days someone is off. I feel like “less gets done than usual” is obviously fine, and “nothing at all gets done” or “it’s unsafe when we don’t have the whole team” are obvious no-nos. OP’s situation seems to fall somewhere in the middle but I can’t tell which end of the spectrum. OP cites “friction and delays and impacts the work of the whole place” but is that friction because of magical thinking and setting them the exact same deadlines as when they’re full power, or is it because their work is just close to impossible when they’re not full power?

    Reply ↓
    1. Lexi Vipond*

      Yes – a football team needs 11 players even if some other players are injured, some kind of production line might need six positions filled to work at all – it depends a lot on the team.

      And even without that, if there really is exactly 6 person-worths of work to be done (is there a real word for that unit?), then 6 people to do it doesn’t seem enough – even if each person gets 3 or 4 weeks of leave a year that’s nearly half the year without 6 people to do 6 people’s work, if they get 7 weeks it’s getting on for all the year.

      Of courses, there may be actually be 5.5 person-worths of work for the 5.5 people actually available, work doesn’t necessarily divide neatly into person-sized chunks, but it doesn’t sound like it from the OP’s description.

      Reply ↓
      1. AcademiaNut*

        That’s what occurred to me. With 6 people, and even fairly modest sick leave and vacation policies, plus training courses, being ‘understaffed’ is significant part of the year, and should be treated as normal operations. So they either need another staff member, or they need to readjust expectations so they aren’t spending half the year running behind schedule.

        Reply ↓
  10. Viette*

    LW1 photos for the work avatar question – I think you should let go of trying to look “really good” in your work avatar. (This is different than a headshot for marketing purposes.)

    For your own sake, you need to look good enough in your work avatar photo that you can stand to look at it often. For everyone else’s sake, you need to look recognizable.

    It’s just not the place for a full on glamor moment. You don’t need to be a babe or a stud in your work avatar photo. If you look too done up, it even fails at being recognizable. In fact, too much of a glamor shot and I think it can actually come across as unprofessional because it seems to miss the point of looking recognizable in favor of looking attractive.

    Reply ↓
    1. WoodswomanWrites*

      I agree on this one. LW1, I remember a couple of times seeing photos of people on LinkedIn and even their own websites that weren’t images that aligned with a professional purpose. Not saying this is you, but your post is reminding me of one that looked more like a dating profile. I once saw a photo of a guy on his professional website who had this suggestive look and posture and when I showed it to a couple colleagues who work in marketing, they were appalled.

      Reply ↓
    2. bamcheeks*

      It doesn’t have to be “full-on glamour”, though– professional make-up doesn’t necessarily mean heavy make-up. And the really big difference is having a photo taken by someone who has a good professional camera and knows how to use it. I can see which of my colleagues have professional photos as their Teams avatars because they survive much better being shrunk down to 30×30 pixels!

      I don’t think I would use a photo with a veil but I did use my CP photos for work things because they were much brighter and clearer than any others I had. And my standard Teams and LinkedIn photo (now eight years old and due for replacing, sigh) is a headshot taken by a colleague who is a wedding photographer on his weekends. In both of those I’m wearing basic make-up I did myself, but the quality of the picture is light-years ahead of pretty much any other photograph I have.

      Reply ↓
    3. amoeba*

      I’d say it also depends on the company culture – most people here use snapshots, basically nobody in my department has any kind of professional headshot as their Teams avatar. So even a more professional version would probably stand out more (although not in a horrible way or anything) than just taking the head bit from a nice pic from your last holiday.

      Reply ↓
  11. Agent Diane*

    OP3 is there any flex for the team to set different expectations to allow for someone being out? So if you’re currently committed to doing the task within 2 working days, can it be expanded to 3 working days?

    Then when the team is fully staffed, you’re all under promising and over delivering. And when someone is out, you have the extra day to still meet service delivery commitments.

    If that isn’t possible, talk to your manager about what to do with anyone who is complaining to you. If someone hears “we’ll get to that on Tuesday” and starts complaining, can you transfer them to your manager? Then the pains in the a*** become your manager’s problem and they might start to consider having the extra cover or resetting service level expectations.

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  12. JM60*

    #2 Personally, I’d like the whole “bless you” thing to go. Whenever I sneeze, I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything if someone didn’t say it, and I don’t feel like it has any point whenever someone does say it. If someone says it repeatedly after repeated sneezes (like in this post) I find it annoying.

    I don’t get what the benefit of saying it is to either person.

    I think this is one of those cases where people do it solely because they’ve been trained that it’s rude not to say, but there’s no underlying reason why it’s rude other than people have always considered it rude to not say.

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    1. amoeba*

      In Germany, they (being the “Knigge”, which is basically… *the* “official” manners guide here) tried to make that a thing a few years back – they said instead it would be best to just politely ignore it.

      They have since changed that again because there was a *huge* backlash. I believe they still recommend foregoing the “bless you” in large groups though because it creates to much of a disturbance – so LW’s situation might be covered, haha!

      Reply ↓
  13. AnonFed*

    As a fed, people have been sharing personal phone numbers around the office like crazy. Just ask, everyone will understand.

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  14. r..*

    LW1,

    in general internal chat avatars are to facilitate internal communication, not for marketing purposes. I get that you want to look good in it, and that’s entirely normal, but my suggestion would be to choose one that 1) is something you are content to look at, and 2) is appropriate for your work culture, and 3) helps people remember you.

    What this means will depend a lot on how your internal communication works, and it may also be something you can be creative with.

    For example I run an engineering org across three different countries, and my avatar is … a somewhat cheeky looking mountain goat. The thing is that compared to the rest of the industry in I tend to have very above-average standards on a number of things; the goat and the story that goes with it serves to take the edge off of that, and helps to convince people that despite of me sometimes being very demanding I can take a joke and laugh about myself.

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  15. Shirley B*

    Respectfully disagree on number 3! If you have a team that needs six pairs of boots on the ground at all times, you can’t consider yourself fully staffed with six people. Taking into account the collective amount of annual leave and sick days, plus a small contingency margin, you should have a staff of seven.

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  16. Frosty*

    #3 I think this depends on several factors: how important it is to the employer to always achieve the output of 6 people, and on the amount of PTO and scheduling.
    In general, my opinion is that if the boss strictly insists on the output of 6 people everyday, they have to make sure you are staffed with 6 people every day, with overstaffing, temps, jumping in themselves, whatever.

    But let’s look at the math of a 6-person department: This year has 234 working days in my location (i.e. days that aren’t on a weekend or a statutory holiday). If everyone has 30 days PTO, that means on 180 of those days you are short-staffed. That’s 77%, just for the minimum absences! We don’t yet have any sick days or training days! In that case I would say: if this department needs the work of 6 people every day, it actually needs 7 employees to be fully staffed.

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    1. bamcheeks*

      Yeah, this is the maths you should be doing, LW, based on whatever your specific working patterns and PTO allowance is, and then look at typical sickness patterns over 1-2 years. What you cannot do is assume that “six people employed full-time” means “six people every working day of the year” — it is usually much closer to 5.4 people when averaged out across the year. Whether that’s enough depends on the type of work you do, and whether that 6 people is just the optimum number to get the job done or a non-negotiable safe minimum. If you are doing business-critical work which requires 6 people working all or the majority of the time, you do the maths in the opposite direction and then tell your managers that you should be employing 6.8FTE or whatever.

      (Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why care-work looks so incredibly expensive as soon as you start to treat it like a real job! One parent looking after any number of their own children can work an 18+ hour day without a break. As soon as you want to staff a daycare that takes children from 7am-7pm, you pretty much need a minimum of 2 full-time staff to every 3 children simply to make sure everyone gets a 8 hour day, lunch and toilet breaks. And with children under 5 you don’t get much economy of scale whether it’s 3 children or 30.)

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  17. 2cents*

    2) There was a time when I’d had terrible sneezing fits (to this day I think they were stress/emotional related because they went away after some time), and a dear colleague, upon witnessing it for the first time, naively said “bless you” after the first one. As it went on, he waved it off and said “you know, I’ll just wait until you’re done” – and so he did, every time from that day on!

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  18. AlsoSneezy*

    I am another frequent multiple sneezer. Years ago at my job, I used to get so many “bless you”s, even texts and IMs from people too far away to yell it out, but who recognized my sneeze pattern from down the hall. Or people who would say one “bless you” for each of my nine-in-a-row sneezes.

    I went on a crusade for a few weeks replying to every person “one per day is plenty! I’m sure it covers me all day once I get one bless you.”

    Eventually it slowed down and stopped altogether. If a new person starts at work I just let them know my “policy” of one per day and they get over the amusement of my sneezes pretty quickly.

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