Take care of yourself!
With cold and flu season firmly here, one of the ways to help turn your workplace into a WOWplace is to keep yourself healthy… and help your co-workers stay that way.
My husband and I have been traveling a lot for the past couple of weeks, and he picked up some kind of flu that bloomed and then turned into bronchial pneumonia in less than a week! While we were at a hotel in Las Vegas, I was buying medicine at the hotel convenience store (at $3.00 a pill – YIKES!!) just to try to get him better quickly.
By the time we got back home, 3 days after the worst of it had come on, he was in the emergency room, getting X-rays, antibiotics, cough medicine, and the like. We were lucky it hadn’t turned into a full-blown pneumonia, but it taught us a few lessons:
- While you don’t want to run to the doctor (or miss work) for every little sniffle, when something comes on suddenly, in flu season, and your body is weakened from travel or other stress, don’t wait to get it checked out.
- If you’re in a high risk category, and your doctor feels you could benefit from the flu shot, it might be a good idea. My husband was planning to get his flu shot in a couple of weeks, when he went on his regular doctor visit… two weeks too late, as it turns out.
- If you’re coughing and sneezing, don’t go to work and spread it around. The last thing your co-workers (or your company) need is to get sick as well. Take those couple of days and take care of yourself, so you can recover quickly and get back to full health for yourself, and full productivity for your company. Think about it: if you’re feeling miserable, how much work are you really getting done, anyway? And what’s the quality of the work?
It’s tempting for over-achievers (like many of us!) to “power through” these times, and that’s admirable if it’s possible to do it well, without putting yourself or others at risk.
But sometimes, it’s OK to just take care of yourself, so you can be at your best wherever you go!
