I’m dying over here.
I threw my back out yet again and little is helping. Yes, CareerDiva is beside herself with pain.
I just got back from the doctor’s office so hopefully the muscle relaxers will help. Well, I can’t take them now or you guys would be reading career gibberish.
Yes, I’m working through the agony. I’m a trooper. What can I say.
Actually, I have to work. I don’t have a choice. I don’t get paid unless I keep toiling. And I am speaking at the Massachusetts Women’s Conference next week so I’ve got more to do in less time.
Do you guys work through the pain?
One study talked about in an article on WebMD that was in the Journal of the American Medical Association and was conducted by Walter Steward, PhD, found that absenteeism makes up less that 25% of productivity lost because of pain.
According to Stewart’s 2003 study, over half of the almost 29,000 workers in the random sample said that they had headache, back pain, arthritis or other musculoskeletal pain in the last two weeks.
Traditionally, employers have focused on pain’s most concrete manifestation: sick days. If an employee doesn’t show up to work, it’s easy to notice.But Stewart says that absenteeism is not the biggest problem for employers. The rest comes from people who show up to work, but who can’t work efficiently because of their pain. Stewart calls it “presenteeism.”
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about presenteeism so I’m not sure this guy Stewart actually coined the pharse.
This is supposedly a worker that goes to work because they have to but they really don’t have their heart or mind into the toil.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m trying to keep my heart and mind turned on, even though I probably could crush a bullet between my teeth.
December 6th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
I hope, by now, you are in la-la-land and that your back will recover soon.
I get severe migraine headaches periodically. While I will occasionally go home midday if I can’t shake one (I think I did that twice this year), I try to work through them. There are some things that simply won’t get done while I’m out, and since I’m planning on working here after the headache is gone, I don’t want leave my work for someone else to pick up. I’ll stay until everything critical is done–my coworkers simply know not to bother me too much when I am wearing my sunglasses in the office.
That said, I definately am less productive on such days, but I can’t quantify it. I know I’m probably slower, but at the same time I’m also not taking breaks or lunch, or conversing with my peers (when it’s really bad and I’m in the office, I just want to stay in one place with the lights dim and have quiet).
Here’s something I have noticed, though. Although my employer has a fairly generous sick-time policy, I find myself loathe to use it. If I lose half a day, I work extra the rest of the week to bring my total hours back to their regular level. Am I the only one who does that? In part, I guess I don’t wnat to be seen as trying to fleece my employer’s policy, and I don’t want to give my peers any basis for complaining about me not putting in enough time. Funny thing–being salaried was supposed to de-emphasize time and allow us to focus on production. In reality, it seems to have become an excuse to push people to work longer hours for the same compensation package.
December 8th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
There is always guilt or a sense of letting down your cohorts when using your sick time. I used to feel that way until an incident occured. Steve was a supervisor of construction carpenters. He was a regular, every day customer and friend at our industrial supply store. Christmas was on a Sunday that year, so on Friday he was a t our store as usual. The job was roughing frames for concrete to be poured the day after Christmas and apparently the materials needed fell far short of the job. He made at least three visits to our store that day, and on each visit he’d be coughing and said he felt congested, however that is a typical Pittsburgh ailment. He plugged on and well that was that. On Monday I heard the news, 36 year old Steve died Christmas morning of a massive coronary while opening presents with his children. After the funeral I heard from his boss, Steve was heading to the Doctor’s to get a check up and something to ease his congesting, and Steve the trooper skipped that and made sure he and his crew finished the job. His boss said with a lot of affirmity, no job is more important than yourself. To this day, if there is something not right, I would rather use the time to take care of me. My six chikdren will have me alot longer. And if there extra work to do because of a call off, I still say the busier you are, the quicker the time goes.