Psychology
With Covid-19 spreading rapidly, working while sick can cause more harm than just infecting your colleagues.
With Covid-19 spreading rapidly, working while sick can cause more harm than just infecting your colleagues.
At the time of writing, Harvard University has announced it will shut down face-to-face activities. Oh, and Italy has, too. It would surprise me if New Zealand followed suit, but if we do, we’ll be in a better position than many places. For one thing, we have a guaranteed, though limited, provision for sick leave. By law, it’s five days’ sick leave a year after six months of employment, and unused sick leaves accrues to 20 days.
Five days doesn’t sound like a lot, but many countries have no provision at all. Nearly a third of privately employed Americans have no paid sick days. If you’re at the bottom of the wage pile, that figure jumps to almost three-quarters.
So what do you do when you get sick? Take the hit to your minimum wage and have a few days off or swallow some paracetamol and go to work anyway? Indeed, presenteeism, or “taking a wickie” (working sickie), as I’ve seen it referred to, is 50% more likely among people without sick leave.
If it was just about sick leave, though, we wouldn’t see as big an issue as the US, but we know from personal experience that this isn’t the case. Our Director-General of Health, Ashley Bloomfield, says we’ve probably all been guilty now and again of heading into work even with a tickle in our throat, but now is definitely not the time to do that.
The reasons are obvious. In an official World Health Organisationdeclared pandemic, we want to limit the speed of spread to avoid overloading the health system.
Staying home if you’re not sure whether you have an autumn cold or Covid-19 helps.
Looking after yourself is more important than ever at present. Signing up for a flu jab where available is sensible, not because it will protect you from the current pandemic but because it lowers the risk of needing a hospital bed a Covid-19 victim could use.
But even if we didn’t have a pandemic, presenteeism is a problem. Increasing numbers of studies show that it’s not just the sick person who is affected (less productive, more grumpy, etc) but also the company. Wickies spread illness, so others end up in the same position, but they also affect the morale and productivity of everyone who intersects with the sick person.
Aleksandra Luksyte and colleagues at the University of Western Australia have looked into this phenomenon in several studies. Luksyte found, for example, that embedding a confederate – someone who is “in” on the study and whose job it is to play sick – into work groups makes them less productive, and the more similar the confederate is to the rest of the group, the stronger the effect they have on it.
Why show up, even if you do have sick leave available? Research has found that people in high-pressure jobs (ones where the work won’t be done by someone else if you don’t do it) or with unempathetic bosses worry about taking sick leave.
Although the message here is to stay home if you’re sick and you have leave available, there’s also the other side of the coin. In one of my studies, with more than 4000 people around the country, seven out of 10 of us have taken sick leave when we’re not sick. Who’d have thought?
I went back to have a look at the data in the hope of being able to indulge my personal stereotype of Aucklanders, but they’re no more likely than people living in other cities to pull an unnecessary sickie.
However, people living in small South Island towns are less likely than anyone else to do this. Hardy bunch, those southerners.
People in highpressure jobs or with unempathetic bosses worry about taking sick leave.