People who work sick hinder business

CHICAGO, July 10 (UPI) -- People who work sick are more likely to hinder business than help, researchers at Chicago's Loyola University said.

Illness interrupts productivity by creating a distraction and causing both the sick person and colleagues to focus on the illness instead of their jobs. Illness also blurs the lines between personal and professional relationships, university medical director Mary Capelli-Schellpfeffer said.

"It's good for people to feel like a team and care about each other, but it's not healthy for people to be invasive of each other's privacy, including their medical privacy," Capelli-Schellpfeffer said. "It disrupts the interactions of the team and can be corrosive, even setting the stage for future judgments, misunderstandings and biases."

Illness in the workplace also can affect how clients and customers view the stability of the company, she said.

"It takes away from the integrity of the company brand and causes people to look at an organization in a way that was not intended," Capelli-Schellpfeffer said.