The Rise of 'COVID Shame' in the Workplace

It’s the moment we’ve all come to dread: standing in the bathroom as two dreaded red lines take form on your lateral flow test. And with COVID-19 cases still averaging around 90,000 per day in the UK, it has become a creeping inevitability for many of us.

When testing positive, it’s natural to feel concerned for your health and those of the people you’ve been in contact with, as well as dismay about the cancelled plans and periods of isolation that lie ahead. But for lots of people, the first overriding emotion has become shame.

We’ve all experienced some quiver of shame and guilt around COVID-19, from coughing on a train to texting everyone at a house party the following morning to report your positive test. But recently there’s been a far more sinister sense of shame circulating, related to the impact of becoming ill on the security of your job and the wellbeing of your colleagues.

“I was terrified of telling my boss,” says Katie, a 30-year-old admin assistant who tested positive during the pandemic. She had witnessed her boss shaming her colleagues in the past for missing work over symptoms or staying home to await test results. “I felt so guilty knowing my colleagues would be covering for me, and that my manager would probably bitch about me.”

Katie’s illness turned into long COID, and resulted in her being off work for around six weeks. “I felt awful with every single check-in with occupational health,” she says. “Their words were supportive, but I felt like work would actually be mad at me.”

Even without the unique stress of a global pandemic, people in the UK are terrified of calling in sick. In 2019, workers surveyed by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) averaged a low rate of six sick days per year, in line with a downward trend that has seen less and less illness-related absences every year. This could be down to the fact that the health of the general population is largely improving decade on decade. But the CIPD’s research also found that 70 percent of respondents had used their annual leave to recover from illness (or to catch up on excessive work) instead of calling in sick.

This rising tide of presenteeism (the term for going to work even if you’re not well) is tightly interwoven with COVID shame. A recent workplace survey from Canada Life surveying working Brits revealed at least a third of people worked while sick during the pandemic, and 21 percent of employees were worried about letting down their team or being seen as slacking by their bosses.

There are also fears over being made redundant, a fear 23-year-old Chloe knows too well. While working at a high street retail store as a sales assistant, her boss became lenient about pandemic regulations. “During times where the store should have had a maximum capacity of eight customers,” she says, “the management prioritised sales over health and continued to allow crowds in.” In addition, she frequently heard the virus described as “an inconvenience, rather than a health threat”.

Chloe felt that her boss’s actions created a culture of shame that left employees feeling like they couldn’t bring up “bad news” related to the pandemic. “Not long before I left the job, I thought I’d caught the Delta variant, because I had all the symptoms,” she says. “I told my boss and he said that because I was on my probation period, calling in sick would not ‘look good’ for me, and I’d probably have to find another job.”

Fortunately, Chloe found another job so she could escape this environment, but that isn’t an option for many. Christopher, a 29-year-old barber whose name has been changed, admits that he’s been taking lateral flow tests less frequently as the pandemic has gone on, and his employer’s attitude towards COVID-19 is the main reason.

“At the start of the pandemic, everyone was sympathetic if you got symptoms or had to have time off,” he says. “There was an understanding that isolation was important for public health and to keep the business going.” But as the pandemic wore on, Christopher found his colleagues and management talking about it differently.

“It started sort of harmless,” he says. “If someone got COVID-19 and it resulted in everyone isolating – or just not coming in themselves – they’d be playfully referred to as ‘patient zero’ basically forever.” Christopher says it was “just banter”, but he knew he never wanted to be ‘patient zero’.

“Eventually, my coworkers got pissed off and bitched about anyone who had time off that they had to cover for, even if it was about COVID-19,” he says. “I stopped taking lateral flow tests as often as I should, especially for someone who comes into contact with the public so much.”

Maintaining this culture of shame has significant consequences, says Blaine Landis, a psychologist researching Organisational Behaviour and assistant professor at UCL School of Management. “Employees who continue to work while they're sick tend to be at risk of burnout and emotional exhaustion,” he adds. But, most importantly, the responsibility for this lies with employers, not workers.

“Employees might be reluctant to call in sick because they've noticed that others carry on working when they're sick and they want their behaviour to be consistent with what they perceive as the social norm,” he says. “This is why leaders need to establish clear guidelines for what to do when you're sick so that informal social rules don't influence these decisions.”

There is no shame in contracting COVID-19, a disease which is still killing more than 200 people per day in the UK. But what is shameful is creating a workplace where employees are encouraged to hide their illness and work through it, endangering themselves, their colleagues and members of the general public.

@bethmayashley