With a cold at work?
The autumn is here, no use denying it anymore.
And with it, the 50-odd cold viruses as well as the annual flu virus begin causing the first sick leaves of the season.
I recently re-posted on LinkedIn a couple of interesting articles regarding calling in sick and the subtle pressure to turn up at work while ill (LinkedIn updates).
How many of you haven”t you seen a sneer on a colleague’s face at the announcement that “John is ill, he’s not coming in today”. Or heard at a lunch break “John? Sick again? He’s all the time sick!!!”
Somehow, as the above mentioned articles also discuss, hard working, seriously motivated career people don’t call in a sickie when they have a cold or a bit of a flu. A bit of a fever won’t stop them. They pack a paracetamol or two, throat lonzenes in their laptop back and just turn up at their desk. Because they do not want others to think of them as weak? Because appearing so “strong” is cool? Because calling in sick for anything less than a life threatening condition is thought of as the lazy way out? Not wanting to burden colleagues with more work? Not wanting to disappoint clients? And what will the boss think?
And yet, colleagues, clients and managers should be most grateful if employees just didn’t turn up at work with a simple cold or flu. When I was working in a healthcare environment, a fantastic manager told me once “I’d much rather you stayed at home until fully recovered; I’d rather miss you for a few days than having you here and infecting the rest of my personnel.”
Exactly!
Not to mention that the coughing colleague with the runny nose is immensely distracting, resulting in lower productivity of all those unfortunate enough to share an office with him. The performance of an employee with a cold or flu is lower, much lower than normal; and the chance that mistakes are made or things overlooked much higher. At the end, clients and bosses are not happy either…
And yet, we all keep on doing it. We keep on going at work when we could better be staying at home with a cup of tea, giving our bodies the chance to properly and quickly recover. Because in these situations, our body just needs rest, wasting energy in working (instead of using this energy to recuperate) simply delays recovery. Resulting in even more infected colleagues, even more distraction and even more mistakes.
Why do we keep on doing it? Isn’t it time to change our approach?