Is it a good idea to inform the employer about your illness?

To tell or not to tell the employer about chronic and severe illness?

This is a difficult topic because it is ambiguous. Assessing that social consciousness is at an increasingly higher level, we suggest that we live, first of all, in truth with each other. In view of this, if we come to an employer and inform: "I have x or y illness, it involves such and such a solution, it can cause sickness absence or worse and the need for rest at work," but at the same time we outline the competencies, showing that we are acutely irreplaceable and the best in the world in this position, then in my opinion such an employer should feel safe, knowing how to navigate in this environment. I would suggest speaking up, but appropriately. Perhaps first recognize what the employer knows about the disease and somehow broach the subject. Honesty will certainly pay off.

For a small company, an employee who gets sick and has a lot of absenteeism can be a problem. What to do in such a situation? How do you talk to the employer to make him feel safe?

It mainly depends on our competencies. We just have to update them all the time, we have to take part in various training courses, be active at work. We have to show that we are able to manage our time, perhaps in a slightly different way, e.g. if someone feels worse, leaves work earlier, then in that case he will make up what needs to be done on the weekend, in the afternoon, or he will do the work faster. It's up to us. I think the time of employees who come "from to" is over. As employers, we expect people who are hired to be active, creative, independent. So if we show such an attitude, I think any employer will prefer to have such a person, even with an illness that may cause absenteeism of some magnitude, rather than a person who will just come in, perform tasks and do it dispassionately because he doesn't like his job. We respect each other. Of course, the challenge is to choose a job that one likes and is passionate about, will simply give great pleasure. Because it's not like working for a week or a month or two, we just want to be at work and grow, develop our personality. Here I would rather encourage you to first take a very deep look at yourself, see what is our competence, what gives us fun in life, so that this work is not a job, but first of all our life and point of development.

And what about co-workers? There are situations that the employer will accept, but in turn the employees will think Ok, if he/she doesn't come, I have to do the work for this person. How to play out these interpersonal relationships?

For me, the time of talking about illness in the context of something that is a hardship, that we need to help someone like that, to make it easier, has passed. People just can't stand the tension of civilization anymore, so we should show our co-workers that we are just cool, that maybe someone needs to be advised, for example, about a child or a project, let's just be open. Let's be there for people. Let's be interested in them. Then in such a friendly atmosphere, I am convinced that no one will look crookedly at a person who is absent from work for two days and has to do some research at the hospital. It will be normal. It will be part of life. We don't live in a candy world and there are no perfect situations. Illness or any other difficult situations are part of life. If we accept them in this way, social understanding will certainly be high. We can also teach others, give them a gateway, that if something difficult happens to someone else in life (after all, it doesn't have to be an illness, but, for example, a problem with a child or parents or divorce, something that redirects our attention to other tracks) then it is understandable, ok, because it happens. Such a culture of life, understanding that life is also about that.

It's no longer just workers with chronic diseases, but we also have more and more seniors who will probably work longer and longer. And here we have similar challenges.

Of course. Only paradoxically it happens that seniors and people who are now about 40, 50 or 60, who have entered the labor market, are employers. They work very differently. I, for example, listen to employer friends in my business complain about the youth who are coming to work at the moment. Such young people come and say that they have to leave at this hour, because they have, for example, yoga, "I'll come later, because something else there, I won't do this, I won't do that." For them, work is only from now on, until now. So I would suggest that we build this environment for ourselves so that for all of us it is the very thing that activates us from the mental and purely social side, so that the work environment is an interesting thing for us, not just something from to. It seems to me that then the seniors (the real ones) will find a place and the generation of 50-60-year-olds. I see these as my successors, because often positions in corporations of all kinds are held, not given to young people for fear that they won't be able to cope. Will they work the way we did for 20-30 years?

No, because they won't work 15 hours a day.

It would be good to wring out of them the desire to give more of themselves, to like their work, to make it their piece of life, not just a place where you come and do something there to make money. Work takes up so much time these days that it really should just be satisfying.

Patients with chronic diseases or cancer often emphasize how important work is to them and appreciate that no one has fired them, that the boss has moved them to another lighter position. Can the state systemically do something to support employers? When someone, for example, returns to work after heavy oncological treatment, his performance, will not be what it was before the disease. It is necessary to wait for such a person and give him some time.

In my opinion, it depends on whether it is the private or public sector. Solutions in the public sector seem much easier. It's some kind of subsidies or the possibility of reducing working hours during the day for a person who comes back after treatment or is in treatment. Because that is also aggravating. In the private sector, it seems to me that there are all sorts of organizations that I think it's time to suggest this, that we should come up with solutions on how to support private companies so that their employees who happen to be facing a health problem or treatment problem at any given time, how can we help and regulate this in a legal way? Because the real issue is that the employee should feel safe in all this, so that they don't ask for a day off for treatment, but that it is simply understood and no one rolls their eyes that this person won't be there. I think it would be appropriate to ask umbrella organizations to look at how to solve this kind of thing.

So we tell the employer if we get sick. But how do we tell?

We speak in an open manner. First of all, you need to be very well prepared, including what the treatment options are, so that the employer does not see this as the end of the world, but a kind of stage of human life, belonging to every human being, which will be resolved at some time. So that he feels the responsibility that we are a kind of community first of all as a people, a country, a civilization. So there is room for different things, and we have to adapt life to ourselves and the different moments in it, the turbulence as well.

Especially since we will all be patients someday.

We will also all be elderly people someday. Most women will want to have a child someday. This is one pool of ways of what to do in order to show a given person, who is, after all, leading her own life, that she is not just an element in a puzzle, that she is an employee, a cog in the machinery of a given corporation or workplace. He is first and foremost a human being. And this is probably the most important thing. This is what we should pay attention to.