The day my After the Bell column lost the fight against colds and flu

I hope that your family has not had a rough colds and flu season. But we have. For the past 10 days or so the sound of coughing and sneezing has hung around the house, stopped the dogs from getting their walks and generally added to the sum of human misery.

I was one of the holdouts. Standing steadfast in the good fight against germs and evil illness.

Until last night. My throat was on fire, sleep elusive and this morning I came to the realisation that this soldier too had fallen victim.

In case you are wondering where what you are reading is coming from, just know I’m sitting in my bed, two pillows at my back, laptop on my lap and holding off on the stronger and more exciting medications until after I send this to my long-suffering subeditors (I didn’t get to ask my doctor, but I think she might agree that writing After the Bell is equivalent to operating heavy machinery).

I always find one of the hardest parts of being sick – apart from, you know, the actual physical suffering (yes, I really am sick; it’s not man flu!) – is telling the various people I work for.

If I’m feeling ill the night before, should I tell them then? They, understandably, will feel they must get someone to do my job for me the next day. But what if I wake up feeling better?

What if I don’t tell them and only make a decision when I wake up and it’s too late for them to find someone? What then?

Underneath all of this lurks, I think, my real fear. As a reader of the After the Bell column, I suspect it’s one you might share.

I really hate to let someone down. It must be so irritating and frustrating to have to spend time trying to find someone to do a job that someone else had already committed to doing.

But this morning there was no other option. It had to be done. Much of my work requires a throat in good working order and there was clearly no such thing upon my person.

I was lucky enough to be able to see a doctor quite quickly and from my chat with her and then with the pharmacists afterwards, it’s clear this has been quite a busy flu season.

There is some chatter about a different strain of Covid and about something called “Influenza A”. Which somehow sounds more like a catchy name for a fizzy pill than an actual disease.

If this has been a difficult flu season it must be costing companies a fortune. This is the traditional period when people go down with sore throats and colds and sniffles.

And you might not be surprised to hear that it’s virtually impossible to get a verifiable figure for how much sick leave costs our firms.

All sorts of numbers are bandied about. But, I’m sorry to report that while AI gave me some interesting figures, a brief interrogation of the sources it based them on showed that they tend to come from companies selling employee-monitoring tools to companies.

However, we can look at numbers for the country’s biggest employer, which is obviously the government.

Last year the Public Service Commission reported that sick leave cost the government about R10-billion a year.

But that comes with its own health warning because those figures come from the pandemic period.

What we can say is that the cost of sick workers is huge. And in some cases it must have a really big impact on firms.

And it’s not just that they are paying workers for not working on particular days. That can probably be factored into your total cost to company and will even out over a few years.

It’s all of the admin to manage it and the cost of getting someone else to do the job and all of those things that must be frustrating to managers and accountants alike.

I do wonder if the rise of hybrid or working-from-home will make a small difference at some point.

Many people may simply not be well enough to make the commute to the office and to sit with other people all day. They may need their throat in working order for all of that.

But to sit at home, perhaps in bed on a laptop, stops them from being completely unproductive.

This might also make it much harder for a boss to assess whether someone is on sick leave or working.

If it goes too far you might find that a boss just becomes frustrated or suspicious and decides that it’s time to go back to having everyone in the office all the time.

At least then they would know where you are and what you are doing.

And with that warning, dear reader, it’s time for me to switch off this heavy machinery, take my medicine, close the curtains, throw the cat off the bed and follow my doctor’s advice.

Goodnight. DM