Need Advice on Sick Days for Nanny

[Anonymous]

We need to renegotiate our nanny contract in the next 4 months or so. Right now our nanny gets 2 weeks paid vacation, one of those at our election and one at hers. She gets all federal holidays paid. We guarantee her 40 hours a week, but frequently come in slightly under that.
When we interviewed her she told us she didn't ever get sick, and so we didn't include any sick days.
This is not working. I think we have a lot of tension around sick days. She actually does get sick a fair amount, and she also doesn't take very good care of herself. She seems fairly unaware of her own medical conditions and how to manage them. (e.g. she told me that she had a stomach flu but she would be better soon b/c she was taking lots of 'tylenol flu' medicine.)
She has had 3 sick days in the last 6 months where she was too sick to work, we did pay her for these.
I have a separate office over the garage, where I work about 1/2 the days. When I am working in that office, I will frequently do things like go pick up my daughter from preschool over my lunch break b/c I enjoy doing that.
Unfortunately, I think this leads our nanny to view me as not really working. She came up to my office a couple weeks ago after dropping the kids at school and said that she was really really sick to her stomach. I said- are you trying to tell me that you cannot work the rest of the day? Because if that is what you are saying, I need to know that. I cannot pick up from preschool today and school later, so if you are too sick to work I need to call my husband and have him come home.
She kind of sighed and said she didn't want me to call him. (what she wanted me to do was to go get the kids and finish early- but I had appointments blocked throughout the afternoon and couldn't.) I then texted her later in the day to see how she was feeling. She said she was fine, that she realized she actually hadn't eaten anything that day and she felt much better after eating.

That is not an abnormal interaction.
I'm not really sure what to do. I'm hesitant to add sick days because I think she would use them all for things like I outlined above, and then would not have any when she is in fact too sick to work. But it also doesn't work to be in this limbo land.
FWIW, she used all of her vacation for the year in the first 4 months of employment.

[Anonymous]

OK, I also WAH, and part time, and I had a similar situation. Here are the solutions we chose:

1) 12 days paid time off per year, all her choice, to be used for any reason (vacation, sick days, personal days). She also gets guaranteed hours and 8 days of holidays, so plenty of other time off.
2) days accrue at 1 day per month; time off before they accrue is unpaid (I have let my long-term nanny go into deficit, but would not let a new one do so).
3) A conversation, wherein you say, first: "I appreciate that you are willing to work when you aren't feeling 100%. If you are too sick to work, though, you need to make that decision. If you come to work and tell me you don't feel well, I will offer sympathy and tea, but I am not going to make the decision to send you home. You are the only one who can make that decision for you."
4) Part 2: "When we hired you, you said that you rarely get sick, and so we didn't include separate sick days. In fact, you have taken x# of days over the last x# of months, which we have paid because we know sometimes people get sick, and they still have bills. However, we cannot cover an unlimited number of sick days. I would like to renegotiate your benefits package to include some designated sick time off. Beyond that, you will need to use vacation time is you have it or take it unpaid."
5) Part 3: "I know I am here all the time. That has advantages, like knowing that you can leave on time every night, and that I'm here for questions or in an emergency. It also means that we will probably never have to say 'no' to a request for a specific day off. However, we hired you with the expectation that M-F, 8-5, you would be in charge of childcare. If that schedule is turning out to not work for you, we need to talk about it. Otherwise, unless you tell me you're too sick to work, I need reliability."

[Anonymous]

Is she foreign? Sounds like a language issue as well as cultural ( e.g. Seeing you as not working when home)

All nannies should have a set amount of sick days. Our nanny has five sick days a year and in the last two years has only taken one sick day after I insisted.

[Anonymous]

To be honest, I would hire someone else. She simply does not sound very smart.

We also give two weeks vacation (one to be taken while we're on vacation and one at nanny's choosing), then also five "PTO" days - whether the nanny is sick or has errands to run or simply needs a mental health day.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OK, I also WAH, and part time, and I had a similar situation. Here are the solutions we chose:

1) 12 days paid time off per year, all her choice, to be used for any reason (vacation, sick days, personal days). She also gets guaranteed hours and 8 days of holidays, so plenty of other time off.
2) days accrue at 1 day per month; time off before they accrue is unpaid (I have let my long-term nanny go into deficit, but would not let a new one do so).
3) A conversation, wherein you say, first: "I appreciate that you are willing to work when you aren't feeling 100%. If you are too sick to work, though, you need to make that decision. If you come to work and tell me you don't feel well, I will offer sympathy and tea, but I am not going to make the decision to send you home. You are the only one who can make that decision for you."
4) Part 2: "When we hired you, you said that you rarely get sick, and so we didn't include separate sick days. In fact, you have taken x# of days over the last x# of months, which we have paid because we know sometimes people get sick, and they still have bills. However, we cannot cover an unlimited number of sick days. I would like to renegotiate your benefits package to include some designated sick time off. Beyond that, you will need to use vacation time is you have it or take it unpaid."
5) Part 3: "I know I am here all the time. That has advantages, like knowing that you can leave on time every night, and that I'm here for questions or in an emergency. It also means that we will probably never have to say 'no' to a request for a specific day off. However, we hired you with the expectation that M-F, 8-5, you would be in charge of childcare. If that schedule is turning out to not work for you, we need to talk about it. Otherwise, unless you tell me you're too sick to work, I need reliability."

This is smart.

[Anonymous]

OP, I empathize as my situation is somewhat similar to yours. If you have been giving her paid sick days for when she is truly sick, I would not renegotiate her benefits package to include these as you are concerned she might abuse them. If you otherwise really like your nanny, I would have a conversation with her about how she needs to take better care of herself, such as eating proper meals, as she can take good care of your child only if she is taking good care of herself. This might seem a bit much to some people, but you could also for a while, ask the nanny if she ate breakfast that morning. Most people can't flip a switch and change their behavior and a daily reminder that she needs to eat would be a gentle albeit slightly annoying way to help her. I would also discuss your mutual expectations of each other when it comes to your doing things for your kids when working from home and use this as a forum for setting up ground rules. E.g., ask her, "when I'm working from home, do you think that I'll pick up the kids most of the time?" If she says yes, you respond that even though you do do it most of the time, she should EXPECT zero from you and act accordingly. So unless you say you are going to pick up the kids, she should go about the day with zero expectation of this. And what I have had to do a couple times with our nanny is that when it was apparent to me that she expected me to do something (with me having done nothing to make her think this) and I actually was planning to do it, I actually made it a point NOT TO so to be a learning moment for her not to expect the particular thing from me.

Oftentimes, I am home for part of our nanny's work day. Because of this, I found that nanny had strange expectations of me, such as that I would finish up the laundry she didn't get to, help out with DC so she could make DC's lunch, let her leave early just because. I had to sit down with her and stress, sometimes multiple times, that she should expect nothing from me unless and until I said I would do X. In our case, I do think there were some cultural expectations that if the mom is around, she will be caring for the child. It took a few months, but she gets it now.

[Anonymous]

I think you should add-in five paid sick days per year or offer more paid or unpaid time off.

Could she have possibly caught a bug from your child?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We need to renegotiate our nanny contract in the next 4 months or so. Right now our nanny gets 2 weeks paid vacation, one of those at our election and one at hers. She gets all federal holidays paid. We guarantee her 40 hours a week, but frequently come in slightly under that.
When we interviewed her she told us she didn't ever get sick, and so we didn't include any sick days.
This is not working. I think we have a lot of tension around sick days. She actually does get sick a fair amount, and she also doesn't take very good care of herself. She seems fairly unaware of her own medical conditions and how to manage them. (e.g. she told me that she had a stomach flu but she would be better soon b/c she was taking lots of 'tylenol flu' medicine.)
She has had 3 sick days in the last 6 months where she was too sick to work, we did pay her for these.
I have a separate office over the garage, where I work about 1/2 the days. When I am working in that office, I will frequently do things like go pick up my daughter from preschool over my lunch break b/c I enjoy doing that.
Unfortunately, I think this leads our nanny to view me as not really working. She came up to my office a couple weeks ago after dropping the kids at school and said that she was really really sick to her stomach. I said- are you trying to tell me that you cannot work the rest of the day? Because if that is what you are saying, I need to know that. I cannot pick up from preschool today and school later, so if you are too sick to work I need to call my husband and have him come home.
She kind of sighed and said she didn't want me to call him. (what she wanted me to do was to go get the kids and finish early- but I had appointments blocked throughout the afternoon and couldn't.) I then texted her later in the day to see how she was feeling. She said she was fine, that she realized she actually hadn't eaten anything that day and she felt much better after eating.




About a kindeness?

That is not an abnormal interaction.
I'm not really sure what to do. I'm hesitant to add sick days because I think she would use them all for things like I outlined above, and then would not have any when she is in fact too sick to work. But it also doesn't work to be in this limbo land.
FWIW, she used all of her vacation for the year in the first 4 months of employment.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We need to renegotiate our nanny contract in the next 4 months or so. Right now our nanny gets 2 weeks paid vacation, one of those at our election and one at hers. She gets all federal holidays paid. We guarantee her 40 hours a week, but frequently come in slightly under that.
When we interviewed her she told us she didn't ever get sick, and so we didn't include any sick days.
This is not working. I think we have a lot of tension around sick days. She actually does get sick a fair amount, and she also doesn't take very good care of herself. She seems fairly unaware of her own medical conditions and how to manage them. (e.g. she told me that she had a stomach flu but she would be better soon b/c she was taking lots of 'tylenol flu' medicine.)
She has had 3 sick days in the last 6 months where she was too sick to work, we did pay her for these.
I have a separate office over the garage, where I work about 1/2 the days. When I am working in that office, I will frequently do things like go pick up my daughter from preschool over my lunch break b/c I enjoy doing that.
Unfortunately, I think this leads our nanny to view me as not really working. She came up to my office a couple weeks ago after dropping the kids at school and said that she was really really sick to her stomach. I said- are you trying to tell me that you cannot work the rest of the day? Because if that is what you are saying, I need to know that. I cannot pick up from preschool today and school later, so if you are too sick to work I need to call my husband and have him come home.
She kind of sighed and said she didn't want me to call him. (what she wanted me to do was to go get the kids and finish early- but I had appointments blocked throughout the afternoon and couldn't.) I then texted her later in the day to see how she was feeling. She said she was fine, that she realized she actually hadn't eaten anything that day and she felt much better after eating.




About a kindeness?

That is not an abnormal interaction.
I'm not really sure what to do. I'm hesitant to add sick days because I think she would use them all for things like I outlined above, and then would not have any when she is in fact too sick to work. But it also doesn't work to be in this limbo land.
FWIW, she used all of her vacation for the year in the first 4 months of employment.

If you are saying she is out of paid time off for the rest of the year, then you have a problem. It's only March! You definitely need to sit down with her and rethink your paid time off arrangement.

Show her how many days you've paid her for that were not holidays or days you were gone (so either her vacation or sick days), and tell her that this is the maximum (or more) than you can cover in a year. Tell her that starting next year, you will add sick days, and decide whether or not you can accommodate unpaid days off in excess of her allotted paid time off. If the answer is no, but she has no paid time off for the rest of this year, I don't know what you can do besides fire her and start over with someone else, but of course that person will then start earning paid time off and have sick time. So perhaps the better plan is to tell her she will have three more sick days this year as a gesture of good will and because this situation was confusing for everyone, and the new arrangement will start next year.

Since I WAH, I have also told my nanny that we can adjust her hours if she has a doctor's appointment and doesn't want to use PTO (or take it unpaid). If she makes an early appointment, she can stay late, or if she makes a late appointment, I can start my day earlier.

[Anonymous]

Ask her to make up the hours during the same week.