QUARTER OF US EMPLOYEES GO TO WORK SICK

Washington, 23 Rabiul Akhir 1435/23 February 2014 (MINA) – A survey by NSF International, a developer of public health standards and certification programs, found of the 26 percent of US employees that admitted going to work sick, 42 percent said they feared missing deadlines or were afraid they will have too much work to make up when they got back, if they took a sick day.

It means that One-in-four (quarter) of US employees go to work sick because they’d miss deadlines, they have no paid sick days, or their boss expects it, a survey indicates.

An additional 37 percent said that couldn’t afford to miss a day’s pay because they had no paid sick days and 25 percent said their boss expected them to go to work sick, Press TV  reported as quoted by Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA).

Ninety-eight percent of Americans surveyed acknowledged they judged fellow co-workers who come in sick. However, 67 percent said they considered sick co-workers to be hard workers, while 16 percent said their colleagues who came to work sick are selfish or don’t care about the well-being of their co-workers.

Fifty-seven percent said they would tell a sick co-worker to go home if they thought they were too sick to be at work.

Thirty-three percent of US men said they always go to work when sick, versus 17 percent of women.

Thirteen percent of working Americans said they believed co-workers came to work sick because they don’t trust their colleagues to do the job while they are out, the survey said. UPI

Meanwhile, according to Staples’ annual Flu Season Survey held in last December,  Almost 90 percent of workers come in to work despite knowing that they’re sick. That’s up significantly from two years ago — despite the fact that there are policies we could put in place to reverse this trend.

One way that employers could reduce the number of workers coming in sick is by implementing telecommuting programs. Staples found that more than half of workers at companies with those programs were likely to stay home and telecommute during flu season to avoid spreading or contracting germs.

But 21 percent of those respondents said they still came in to work sick, even though they had the option of telecommuting, because they didn’t think working from home would be feasible. And as Staples points out in its press release accompanying the survey, worker productivity is drastically compromised when the worker is ill — not to mention that many types of work simply cannot be done from  home.(T/P04/E01)

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)