Sickies, mental health days, playing hookie, call it what you will. There are even those times when people are genuinely sick (and not just gutted at the latest loss by the Reds). I started to feel sick on Tuesday and early on in the day, decided that it was going to be better to work from home rather than inflict my cold (as I thought it was at the time) on everyone else in the office. So, from about 11am on Tuesday, I was working from home, sitting on the couch with my laptop and a mobile phone. Unfortunately, my “cold” turned out to be bronchitis and I spent the Wednesday, Thursday and most of Friday asleep, drugged up on various cold & flu meds, antibiotics and painkillers or on the couch with my dog and about a bajillion episodes of Law & Order on Foxtel to keep me company.
Now, this little diversion has a couple of points which I’ll summarise here before going into more detail.
1. If you’re well enough to work, but sick enough to infect everyone else in the office, working remotely is a great way to keep up your productivity without spreading germs etc and making everyone else sick
2. If you’re ACTUALLY sick, as in really truly sick, then don’t stress yourself any further by trying to work when you really should be resting. It’s taken me a long time to learn this and funnily enough, it’s come from the person who you’d think would be most likely to want me to work – ie, my boss.
3. I’ve been sick and would appreciate chocolates, flowers, get well cards etc 
Now, a recent study (friendly, journalistic article link here) has shown that offering employees flexible work hours or working locations can have a positive benefit on both their job satisfaction and job performance.
One of the great things about Windows Small Business Server is its flexibility to accommodate multiple levels of remote access. For example, if your employees have a desktop in the office and want to work from home, SBS offers a platform called Remote Web Workplace. This allows you to take control of your PC in the office over the internet, as if you were sitting in front of it. With a little bit of tweaking/configuration from our side of things, we can even make sure that you can print to your local printer as well as any of the normal printers in the office.
If you normally use a laptop and it travels with you, we can set you up with a VPN connection to allow access to your company data files whilst you’re offsite. So, there’s no more forgetting important documents when you’re on the road or at a meeting with a client.
Best of all, SBS also allows for remote access to your emails through a variety of methods. There’s a website you can access, which looks and feels just like Outlook. We can also set you up with your office emails on your laptop from anywhere in the world. If you *really* want to be in contact 24/7, we can even configure a large number of mobile devices to pull down your emails, calendars, contacts etc from your mail server.
All of these options make for great flexibility in terms of working from home or elsewhere. It also allows you to remain in contact with the office while attending conferences/meetings interstate or overseas.
Now, as for point 2, if you are sick, as in REALLY sick, don’t push it. A report for Medibank Private commissioned in 2007 shows the staggering cost of what is being called “presenteeism”. The bottom line is that employees turning up to work whilst still sick costs Australian employers more than 3 times the cost of absenteeism. That’s $7 billion in lost productivity from absenteeism as opposed to $25.7 billion from presenteeism.
Of that $25.7bn, $17,476,000,000 is from direct losses in productivity. That figure alone is more than twice the total cost of lost productivity from absenteeism. What this tells me (from my totally un-scientific viewpoint), is that employees who come to work for 2 days when they’re sick, could take 4 days off to get better and we’d still come out financially ahead.
Now, I don’t know about you, but if I were working whilst sick for 2 days, there’s a good chance that a single day’s rest and relaxation would probably have done the trick. So, in essence, taking time off to recover when you’re sick looks to be about 4 times more productive as going to work. You can tell your boss that the next time you’ve got a cold or whatever strain of flu hits us this year 
Finally, we come to the last and most important point of my post. This is my favourite chocolate, these are the most expensive flowers I could find, and my ideal get well card should have puppies and kittens on the front and $100 notes in the middle 
Ever arrived home at night, knowing that you have some more work to get done, and realise you’ve left a vital file on the desktop of your work PC? Well, that might be just a sign that you need to put your feet up and relax… but, if the file really needs to be retrieved, you can avoid having to drive back into the office. If you are the lucky user of a Small Business Server, you are able to use a valuable feature called “Remote Web Workplace” (RWW) to access that file.
