Harvard Business Review - Long Covid at Work: A Manager's Guide

[Kalliope]

The article provides several examples of accommodations for workers with chronic illness. Also includes quite a lot about ME.


Quote:

In January 2022 Katie was one of the first researchers to link long Covid disability with a worsening labor shortage. Later that year she and David Cutler, a professor of applied economics at Harvard University, estimated that long Covid costs the U.S. economy between $160 billion and $200 billion per year in lost wages and increased medical costs. In May 2023 the Brookings Institution reported that 700,000 people were absent from the U.S. labor force due to the illness. Some of these people may be too sick to work, even with accommodations.

Yet 65% of adults with the illness are still working — in some cases for fewer hours, or while struggling with tasks that used to be easy for them, or both. Even if they don’t realize it, many employers have a long Covid problem, making it more challenging to hire and retain employees and to support their productivity.

While the focus of this article is long Covid, the recommendations here can help organizations manage the growing number of people with complex chronic illnesses. These include not only ones associated with long Covid, such as ME/CFS and POTS, but also other illnesses that share some symptoms with long Covid — for example, post-concussion syndrome, cancer, and multiple sclerosis.

https://hbr.org/2024/05/long-covid-at-work-a-managers-guide

 

[rvallee]

I read many good comments about this article.

It remains absurd that business and industry press tend to do better coverage of Long Covid than media with a focus on health and medicine. Doctors only seem interested when it impacts their work at their office, but for business managers, it's definitely the case, they can't just send all the people packing, especially when they're key employees and expensive to replace.

I guess the main difference is that MDs have a strong incentive to dismiss the patients, to send them away never to be seen again, while business managers see the cost of having to replace them, and the lost productivity from those who can still work, but only barely, as a net loss, because they need them at their office (or at least working).

What's even more amazing is how dominant the biopsychosocial ideology has become, with its aim of keeping people employed even when they can't do the work, and yet they achieve exactly the opposite of that. It's really hard to fail at anything harder than this, they are setting the all-time bar for incompetence.

 

[Ash]

I read many good comments about this article.

It remains absurd that business and industry press tend to do better coverage of Long Covid than media with a focus on health and medicine. Doctors only seem interested when it impacts their work at their office, but for business managers, it's definitely the case, they can't just send all the people packing, especially when they're key employees and expensive to replace.

I guess the main difference is that MDs have a strong incentive to dismiss the patients, to send them away never to be seen again, while business managers see the cost of having to replace them, and the lost productivity from those who can still work, but only barely, as a net loss, because they need them at their office (or at least working).

What's even more amazing is how dominant the biopsychosocial ideology has become, with its aim of keeping people employed even when they can't do the work, and yet they achieve exactly the opposite of that. It's really hard to fail at anything harder than this, they are setting the all-time bar for incompetence.

I agree about the difference.

The business press are talking to each other about how to manage a financial problem for themselves since their go to of getting rid of everyone not producing enough value, can’t work so well with a shrinking population of the most productive workers to go around, and once you have one will they stay that way?


The business classes they respect each other, so they give a somewhat more truthful evaluation of the situation to each other. If workers are slightly less disadvantaged by these comparatively truthful accounts of the situation that’s incidental.

Where as the public facing press and broadcasters are talking down to us because they look down on us all, it is their job to mislead and manipulate us into cooperation with their billionaire owners or governments.

However it was the business sector that loudly demanded that everything was ‘opened up’ following some measure to control infections during the early stages of the pandemic. So… As they sow so shall they reap. But they’re not going down first. That’ll be their workers and all of us.

In medicine the profession can’t even look out for its own, and the doctors are sick. How do they care for us, when it’s not in the culture to take measures to prevent infections as far possible at work, or to care for each other well should they get sick post an infection?

I think you’re right and medicine indoctrinated itself into an extra dose of self-destructive thoughts and behaviours here. I struggle to relate because my thoughts and behaviours are spot on.