Tuesday, 4 November 2025 · Gazette

Counting absences without humiliating the roster

Colleagues in discussion around a table — The sitting waited until the steward had seen the plate.

Absence is the plate people fear. In a Mtskheta packing hall the HR officer asked, before we quoted, that no name sit beside a bar. We already work that way. What she also asked — and this is rarer — was that a steward see the sheet before the sitting.

Why names stay off

A bar that says “Giorgi, Monday” is not a workforce figure. It is a noticeboard. Georgian labour practice, and ordinary decency, both argue against it. Our absence columns are days, shifts, and sometimes sections. If a section is three people, we coarsen the row until a person cannot be read out of it. If we cannot coarsen, we omit the row and write a caption: too small to draw without pointing.

Why the steward saw it first

Tamar waited a day. The steward asked for a hatch to be explained. It was a public holiday eve, mislabelled. We relabelled. The sitting then happened without the feeling of an ambush. Workforce productivity insights that ambush a floor are just another report in a drawer.

If your hall has no steward, we still will not name. If a director demands names, we decline the plate. The rest of a briefing can proceed without that sheet. A briefing that exists only to name people is not a briefing we take.