Ill? Chill. | If you're sick, stay home from work. And that's an order.
Close readers of "Charting Maine's future," the much-ballyhooed Brookings Institution report on our fair state, may have noticed this item near the back: "Challenge: People who go to work sick cost Maine businesses millions each year in lost productivity. Plus, they really chap Scott Sutherland's cheeks."
Ok, so maybe it wasn't a Brookings finding. Still, that part about the chapped cheeks? Totally true.
Take the other night, for example. I hunkered down in my Portland den to watch Letterman, and it was immediately apparent that something wasn't right with Diamond Dave. For starters, he sounded like he had a chicken stuck in his throat. His color was off and he seemed to be moving in slow motion. His delivery was even flatter and more automatic than usual.
He could've stayed in his bathrobe at home in Connecticut, eating Chef Boyardee out of a can and working on his memoirs, but he didn't.
Letterman, ever the show-biz trouper, had come to work sick.
"I feel like I have a chicken stuck in my throat," he croaked during his monologue. Moments later, mocking the oozing horror in his upper respiratory system, Letterman pretended to cough up a small fake songbird. "Well, there's the problem," he quipped. The studio audience guffawed.
Actually, Dave, that's not the problem. The problem is that your millions of viewers watched you bravely soldiering on in the grip of some hideous virus, probably picked up by your kid at daycare, and all you were doing was reinforcing our unfortunate collective instinct to go to work sick. You get paid millions to go head to head with Leno every night; most of us face no such pressure, yet we insist on taking our various contagions to work with us anyway. If an indicator of civilized society is that we keep our germs to ourselves, then we're still no better than wild-eyed barbarians, red in tooth and claw and drippy in nose.
And it's personal, as in pet-peeve personal. Not long ago, a co-worker who I'll call Sniffles showed up to work on a Monday morning, looking like a cartoon of viral misery: bloodshot eyes, nose rubbed raw by Kleenex, complexion splotchy and poxed. I'd been heavy into healthy living for the previous few weeks, part of my efforts to prepare for a 10K cross-country ski race scheduled for that weekend, and the last thing I intended was for Sniffles to wreck it all. I did my best to stay clear of the toxic cloud surrounding Sniffles. I gobbled vitamin C, I pounded water, I washed my hands manically after every touch of a doorknob. Yeah, right. By Thursday I was pretending that the weird little aches and pains pinging through my body weren't really there. By Friday I was fighting a scorching case of post-nasal drip. Race day found me home on the couch doing DayQuil shots and dreaming up ever-more-elaborate ways to kill Sniffles with a ski pole.
The punchline, of course, is that come the following Monday morning, I went to work, still drop-dead sick. I was Sniffles, and Sniffles was I. In fact, I was a serial offender, even with health insurance and sick days, even with the extravagant technology that allowed me to work from home in my fuzzy jammies and fleecy slippers. "But there's no safety net," I whined piteously to my wife, coughing and draining. "I have to be there. Everyone's depending on me."
It should be different by now. For years, we've been pelted with studies showing that employees who are sick at work actually cost companies more than if they'd stayed home.
A 2004 report found that up to 60% of the total cost of employee illness was the result of the reduced productivity of sick people who dragged themselves to their cubicles. We coined a clever label for the problem: "presenteeism." We shook our heads at the 2005 news that nearly half of all employers in yet another survey said that presenteeism was a serious problem, up sharply from the year before. Where would it all end?
The proactive solution
In cold-&-flu-belt states like Maine, we've developed an absurdly high tolerance for this kind of behavior. This time of year, on any given work day, legions of Mainers trudge off to work suffering all manner of scourge: the usual viruses, as well as more exotic variants such as bronchitis, pneumonia, strep and nasty little fast-mutating pathogens picked up on wintertime jaunts to the tropics. We expect our colleagues to endure our public wheezing and hacking and dribbling and exploding as if it's all just another cold-weather inconvenience like black ice or slushy beer, and we endure theirs, and thus the circle remains unbroken.
A couple weeks ago, I picked up the phone and conducted a random sampling of businesses around the state, looking for worker bees who'd arrived at the hive with common colds, scabies, tuberculosis, bird flu or Ebola. To my wonderment, none of the half-dozen establishments I cold-called — marketing firms, manufacturers, medical research outfits — could produce a sickie, though Wayne Gregersen, senior manager for compensation and benefits at Jackson Lab in Bar Harbor, reported that his boss had gone home with "flu-like symptoms" earlier in the day.
Gregersen then proceeded to describe for me the lab's soon-to-launch "pandemic response policy" that all but requires sick people to stay home. "We have millions of [research] mice here, and if 25% of our workers go out with the flu, our business would go down the drain — there'd be no one to take care of the mice," Gregersen said. The idea is to nip a pandemic in the bud before it even gets going, which is why the lab's new policy includes flu shots, an onsite health center, "germicide stations" for hand-washing located throughout the facility and lots of fun signage ("SNEEZE INTO YOUR SLEEVE").
I like it, but I'll take it one step further. Presenteeism, meet proactivism, the ism that cuts sickies zero slack. The proactivist approach calls for businesses to designate an in-house SWAT team to deal with employees who come to work sick. Say the gangly guy in the next cubicle shows up one morning, presenting with what appears to be mumps and whooping cough. You'd simply dial the in-house sickie squad hotline and report him. In moments a crack detachment of your colleagues would mobilize, jump into hazmat suits and swoop down on the gangly guy. They'd stuff him into his own hazmat suit, bundle him into a waiting vehicle and whisk him back home, where his physician would be contacted, hot tea brewed, various poultices and compresses prepared, and the gangly guy would be tucked back into bed with the admonition to stay away from work until he's completely free of swelling and whooping.
On the other hand, maybe my unscientific survey is on to something. Maybe we don't need the hazmat suits, the poultices, or the admonitions after all; perhaps we've finally evolved into beings who have the sense to stay home from work when we awake feeling like chickens are residing in our throats, or when we look in the bathroom mirror and are temporarily befuddled by the sight of Keith Richards staring back at us. Maybe we finally, finally, get it: sick-at-home is the new sick-at-work. Maybe I can finally stop getting my cheeks chapped.
Then again, it could just be the dengue fever talking. I've been fighting this thing for a week now, I'm feeling a little puddin'-headed and it's been a really long day here at the office. Deadlines, you know.
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