My wife is American, and her dad runs a business. He was chatting to another guy (who also runs a business), and they both agreed that they would never give their employees paid sick days as “they will just get used up because the employees will fake being sick”. I told them that, in my experience, that is not true at all, which didn’t change their view in the slightest. :white_frowning_face: I have not worked in the US but from conversations I had it sounds like there is nearly zero trust between employee and employers.

having worked in the US and the UK I wouldn't want to work in the US again. Employees were really afraid of their managers

When your employer is responsible for your healthcare, it adds an even greater imbalance to the relationship

European managers can cruise by on the fact everyone knows they're safe by law. In the US, a manager has to work harder to build trust with an employee. Perhaps the top 5% of managers in the US are better than the top 5% in Europe? Devil's advocate anyway.

how do you judge? The US management is incentivised to maximise profits and look how that’s working out for everyone.

You could draw a curve on employee trust with their manager, measured with a basic survey and determine how it compares across regions.

is that a joke?

Do you take issue with using a proxy measure, or something else?

well, maybe I just meant that none of us will do what you are asking

Oh, of course. But I wonder if someone has! It would be an interesting hypothesis to test.

I know of a few management consultancies using that strategy to test the effectiveness of managers.

are the results published?

The data belonged to the company they were testing for. They gave some high level numbers though.

dunno, all sounds pretty dodgy. Very unlikely to be the same questions, sample groups, etc…

When I moved to the US, I had to moderate my management style quite a bit. Everything is a lot more heavily legislated here (in the US) and "at will" employment cuts both ways: staff can quit with no notice and for "no reason" so managers have to be careful in that area.

The work/life balance issue is definitely a fair criticism against US companies. Where I work is unusual since it has a very flexible PTO system -- and rolls all of the "sick days", vacation, and national holidays into one big pot, then lets you take time off whenever you want, for whatever reason, and work holidays if then don't mean anything to you (we're a very diverse company so pretty much everyone has different holidays in their religions).

The healthcare approach in the US is seriously broken. Even with healthcare subsidized by my employer, we still have up to $15k per year our of pocket, and our monthly payment is already $1,400 I think.