How One Sick Employee Can Disrupt an Entire Business

Employee illnesses can often be underestimated until it’s too late. What started out as one person with a runny nose can quickly snowball into an entire office being closed. It sounds fascicle, but you’d be surprised by how many are caught out by this each year and it’s only when the offices are forced to close that the realization arrives all too late that preventative measures should be the top of everyone’s priorities. Understanding how one case of illness can empty an office, and how taking simple measures can reduce sick days at work will help you take the right steps to keep your office and workers healthy. 

Presenteeism: When Showing Up Sick Hurts Everyone 

You’d be shocked at how quickly an office can come apart in the wake of rampant sickness. Employee illness often results in high numbers of presenteeism, where despite feeling unwell, an employee comes into work anyway for any number of reasons from a sense of obligation to fear of falling behind. While a sick, but present employee may be seen as favorable compared to an absent employee, it never plays out this way. A sick employee can’t perform at their best, which means their productivity is down, and mistakes creep into their work, which can lead to time-consuming fixes, and this is just in the short term. 

How Modern Offices Accelerate the Spread of Illness 

With most modern workspaces designed to be collaborative environments, this unfortunately means they’re ideal for transmission. Shared spaces, meetings, and close proximity to others all work to accelerate the spread of respiratory illnesses. All it takes is shared equipment, traded files, or high-traffic roles to help further the spread of illness. This is where the real damage is done, with more employees exposed to the illness; it means more sick days, and for those who choose presenteeism and come to work anyway, the situation quickly gets out of hand. This inevitably results in staff shortages, which trickles down to affect every side of your business, from shipment and service delays to reduced customer satisfaction. These disruptions can compound quickly, affecting revenue, compliance, and brand trust. 

Why Proactive Prevention Beats Reactive Response 

As you can see, when it comes to workplace illness, being reactive oftentimes results in disaster. No, a proactive approach helps catch the problem before it develops. A key step to help insulate your workplace is by having test kits available on site to confirm illness early. It’s a key precautionary step to help protect your office, as early symptoms can be caught before infection starts to spread. We recommend the WELLlife 3in1 Combo Test Kit, this versatile test kit can test for Flu A/B and Covid, which each share common overlapping symptoms such as coughing, and fever. One test detects all three viruses, with easy-to-follow instructions and results available in just 10 minutes. It’s perfect for getting results you can act on for a safer workspace.  

Masks as a Critical Layer of Workplace Protection 

When a result is positive, or if a recently sick employee is returning to the office, having masks available on site is another key proactive solution to keeping your workplace safe. A high quality KN95 mask is one of the most effective ways to reduce transmission in indoor settings, with 4 layers of protective layers to insulate the wearer from receiving and spreading a minimum of 95% airborne particulates. Providing access to well-fitting masks helps to protect both symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals. 

It doesn’t take a lot to keep your business secure. Making the effort to be proactive and treating respiratory illnesses with the same level of importance as you would any other company decision, means you keep the office healthy, so when those big decisions come around you’ve got your full team ready to go. That’s just good business.