New work attitude: Keep your germs at home

When a miserable cold struck Kim Colabella in early December, duty called. Her supervisor and several colleagues were out of the office, and Colabella determined that, ailing or not, she needed to keep things going. So she took a cold pill, packed up her tissues and soldiered on to work.

But when Colabella arrived at Corporate Wellness Inc., a Mount Kisco, N.Y., company that coordinates employee health services for other companies, her sniffling, red-eyed arrival won her a decidedly chilly reception. A co-worker followed her around with a box of disinfectant wipes, swabbing down any surface she touched. Fellow employees reared back in horror when she came near and finally banished her to her cubicle. The stricken office worker dared not emerge, even for lunch, and used the fax and copy machines only when she had accumulated enough paperwork to make a single trip.

In another year, Colabella's devotion to her employer would have been lauded. This time, she was as welcome at work as Typhoid Mary. And her transformation from would-be hero to workplace pariah has a simple explanation: the recent shortage of flu vaccine.

Most healthy adults - more than 95 percent, by the federal government's latest reckoning - are entering the flu season unvaccinated. The shortage and subsequent rationing have eased in some states; in California, for example, health officials have ended all age restrictions for the vaccine. At this point, however, most of the nation's healthy workers probably will remain unvaccinated through the season.

As a result, "presenteeism" - the practice of showing up to work sick - is now on the agenda of human-resources departments throughout the United States.

Whether it's a flu, cold or stomach virus going around, companies and their employees are realizing that it takes just one employee coming to work sick to spark a workplace outbreak and set off waves of absenteeism down the line.

"All of a sudden, people are talking about it," says Ron Goetzel, a Cornell University/Medstat economist who studies the phenomenon of working while ill. "It wasn't in people's vocabulary a year ago." Now, he says, "employers are realizing there are real costs to it."

This year especially, says workplace analyst Lori Rosen, "the idea of the 'hero-worker' that manages to punch in for a full day's work despite illness needs to be discouraged." Contagious workers jeopardize the health and productivity of all employees, she says. So their bosses need to emphasize that while they need their employees at work, "they first want a healthy workplace," says Rosen, of CCH Associates, a human-resources consulting firm.

As cold and flu season begins to take hold, companies across the country are issuing memos and posting signs in workplace restrooms, urging workers to wash their hands frequently, cover their coughs and sneezes, get enough rest and eat nutritious foods. Usually appearing at the bottom of this stay-well litany is an admonishment that few bosses have ever issued before, and many - even now - issue through gritted teeth: If you're sick, stay home, employees are being told. And don't come back until you're better.

Make no mistake about it, however: This workplace edict comes not out of a sudden Ebenezer Scrooge-like conversion of bosses everywhere. They're scared: not of the flu itself - with its high fevers and aching muscles - but of an unvaccinated work force decimated by it, causing missed deadlines, blown production runs and shoddy work. Garden-variety viruses are bad enough, but the flu packs a punch that can last a week or more.

Last fall, 60 percent of the large employers polled by the Society for Human Resources Management said they were planning to offer flu shots or sponsor flu vaccine clinics for their employees this year. During last year's flu season, widespread efforts helped push flu inoculation levels among healthy Americans to historic levels - nearly 1 in 4 healthy adults younger than 65 got the shot.

But this year, virtually all such plans were scrubbed after government regulators condemned roughly half the nation's projected supply of flu vaccine because of contamination at Chiron Corp.'s British manufacturing plant. While 27 million doses were quickly set aside for babies, the elderly and those with chronic medical conditions, healthy workers have faced the flu season armed with little more than hand sanitizer and a heightened wariness.

In Manhattan, where flu season has begun in earnest, the denizens of high finance are on guard for sick co-workers as never before. In trading pits where large numbers of salespeople share a common bank of phones, frenzied traders taking incoming calls no longer pick up the nearest handset, says Timothy Pierotti, a portfolio manager at Victoire Finance Capital on Wall Street.

Rather than risk exposure to their fellow traders' germs, most workers will expend precious seconds sprinting back to use their own phones.

And in spite of much evidence that influenza is circulating, nobody - nobody, says Pierotti - will admit to having it, for fear of being banned from the conference rooms, trading floors and after-hours watering holes where money is made and clients are nurtured.

On average, says Dr. Kristin Nichol of the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center, a normally healthy working adult who contracts influenza will be sick - and highly contagious - for five to six days. And he or she will miss, on average, one to three days of work.

Those numbers speak volumes about the work ethic that propels people to work even when they are sick.

"People who don't think twice about keeping a child home from school won't think to stay home two days later when they have the same symptoms," says Roslyn Stone, an executive of Corporate Wellness who serves as chairwoman for the American Medical Association's and Centers for Disease Control's Workplace Flu Prevention Working Group.

When sick workers come to work, it's no bargain for employers. Presenteeism (the opposite of absenteeism) costs companies as much as $150 billion in lost productivity, higher health-care expenses and cascading absences due to contagion, according to a recent report in the Harvard Business Review.

While many human-resources departments have begun to get the message, this year's shortage of flu vaccine comes at a time when presenteeism and the forces that cause it are in full blossom. A fitful economic recovery has left employers scrambling to do more with downsized work forces, and it has fostered insecurity among employees.