So What, You're Still a Rock Star - The Importance of Looking After Yourself, Taking Sick Leave and Properly Managing Your Absences
In August 2018, Pink was in the midst of undertaking an absolute marathon of a tour across Australia. As part of her performance, Pink undertakes a gruelling physical routine on stage which would require many hours of training and preparation. She is incredibly popular in Australia which means many of her performances sell out and more shows are added to her tour. Whilst she was in Australia, she was scheduled to play a whopping 33 shows over a number of months.
Unfortunately, Pink made headlines during her tour due to the cancellation of a number of Sydney shows due to her illness which ultimately resulted in her hospitalisation on 6 August. The Sydney performance on 6 August was cancelled late in the day after many attendees had already started arriving, which caused a lot of criticism directed at how the cancellations were managed.
Whilst performing to arenas full of tens of thousands of people is nothing like what we do every day, there are a number of lessons that can be learnt from Pink's situation in relation to working yourself too hard, looking after yourself and properly managing your time off work as a result of illness.
Nothing good can come from overworking
There is no doubt that Pink expended every ounce of energy and spent many hours in preparation for such a gruelling tour and undertaking to play back to back sold out shows. It is easy to get caught up in the hard work of pursuing your career and trying to reach your goals. For Pink, it was achieving a successful tour. For legal professionals and admin staff, it could mean reaching billable targets, keeping up with heavy workloads or seeking recognition from supervisors.
Ultimately, however, it is not at all healthy to constantly overwork yourself. By working under stressful situations for such long periods of time, you may experience negative effects on your sleep and healthy habits such as diet and exercise, and you may even withdraw from friends and family. At worst, you may find yourself completely burnt out and even experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Sometimes, career driven staff may even dismiss their own health and tell themselves that they need to overwork themselves in order for their career, team or firm to succeed. However, when an employee’s mental or physical health suffers as a result of overworking and they start experiencing burnout, it negatively affects attitudes and productivity at work, as well as the morale within the team as a whole.
In summary, working too hard is not good for you, and it is not good for your team!
It is important to look after yourself, including taking time off and resting when needed
It is so easy to get into the habit of telling ourselves to push through illness because of work commitments and heavy workloads, but it is a habit that should be broken! It is okay to take a day off of work to rest and recover when you are unwell. In fact, it is even preferable for a number of reasons, including:
Many illnesses are infectious. If you come to work unwell with an infectious illness, you are more than likely going to get someone else sick. I’m sure that most office workers have experienced it – one person comes in with a sniffle, and then all of a sudden the whole team is sick! Infecting the whole office with a cold is not a good way to make friends and influence people.
How productive will you actually be at work, if you are feeling unwell? You certainly won’t be able to perform to the best of your ability!
Finally, if you don’t take the time to rest and recover, your illness is likely to be more intense or prolonged than it otherwise would have if you had taken time to recover, meaning that you (and your office) suffers for longer!
It is also important to properly manage your absences
Whist it is important to look after yourself and take leave when required, it is also important to properly manage your absences in order to ensure that you are not letting people down, as much as you possibly can. This means advising others of your absences as soon as possible, and assessing any urgent work that may be required to be undertaken whilst you are not in the office by delegating that work to someone else who has capacity to assist. Of course, properly managing your absence also means not taking advantage and taking numerous days off without any reason.
Moral of the story? As long as you properly manage your absences, you CAN take care of yourself, take time off, and still be a rockstar employee!
