Hungover at work
Few people are dumb enough to turn up to work drunk. However, as Angela Kibui and Anthony Ngare find out, many employees have muddled through their workdays while recovering from the night before.
So you decided to show up at that cocktail party, where you put away all the free spirits on offer. Or you went out on a date intending to have a glass of wine at dinner. Then the wine decided to have a beer and the next thing you know, you’re all over the town hitting the clubs and throwing down a succession of sambuca shots like there is no tomorrow.
But there is a tomorrow, and it’s a working day. At 7am the next day, you’re lying in bed and there’s a little man in your head pounding away with a hammer. You feel like you haven’t slept in weeks. Gingerly, you get up from your bed and weave your way to the bathroom, carefully avoiding furniture that seems determined to trip you over. Once there, you proceed to repeatedly empty your stomach of anything that it may contain. If you are still drunk, you will probably have the sense to call in sick. However, if all you have is a low-grade hangover you will pop a couple of aspirins, drag yourself off to work and struggle through the day.
This is a familiar scenario for many Kenyans, infamous for their drinking habits. Take Chris, who refers to his drinking binges as "curing the cancer". A seasoned bar-hopper, he and his friends tend to drink well into the wee hours of the morning and go to work feeling awful. This never stops him and his buddies from taking up from where they left off.
For Ernest, who works in the Industrial Area, going to the office while hungover is "a frequent thing". "All you need is not to be dumb enough to get caught," he says. He recalls a day about two months ago when he arrived at work very early on a Thursday morning to conceal the fact that he had a hangover. He kept to himself so that the other colleagues wouldn’t know his condition. By eleven o’clock, he could bear it no more and asked to take the rest of the day off saying he thought he had malaria.
"Reporting to work while suffering the effects of intoxicants is a sign of disrespect for the company and for those that the individual interacts with," says Stephen Ngure, Training and Development Manager at the Kenya Tea Development Authority (KTDA). He has had to deal with such situations before. "Even if the person is your best worker but turns up with hangovers once a week, he ought to be shown the door to send a clear message that it shall not be tolerated." He recalls a specific incident when a driver ferrying green tea leaf landed the vehicle in the ditch as he had not had enough sleep and was still nursing a hangover. The driver had been drinking continuously for several days after payday.
"An individual on hangover has diminished productivity," says Ngure, forcing other employees to shoulder the burden of performing his duties. While they may often complain, sometimes colleagues will cover up for the hungover person, especially if they were drinking together or hung out together often.
"In ‘one-off’ situations, patience ought to be exercised with the person," says Joseph Vincent Onyango, HR Manager at K-Rep Bank. This is because, even under normal circumstances, anyone is likely to have a bad day in the office for other reasons. "In any case, (some) people report to duty early enough but do not put in as much work." However, if the problem were persistent, "I would firstly initiate an internal counselling process in a bid to rehabilitate the employee."
Most Human Resources departments in this country are geared to deal with people who are drinking on the job or clearly drunk during working hours. David Kiambi, the HR Manager at a leading international company, says disciplinary measures exist to deal with heavy drinking outside work.
"Employees who work in a department that requires handling of machinery are not allowed to report to work in this condition", he says, "as they pose a danger not only to themselves, but (also) to those around them. Any other employee would also be requested to go home and sober up. If this became a habit, then counselling would be introduced. We issue several verbal warnings, followed by two written warnings within a year (before dismissing a habitual offender)."
Dealing with hungover employees — or staffers just tired from a late night out — is more of a grey area. Firstly, supervisors are less likely to notice, and when they do, they are less likely to take it as seriously as being drunk. Even if you don’t feel severely hungover, your cognitive abilities, concentration and technical skills are actually diminished. With inebriation, both you and your employer are at least more aware of it than when hangover.
Part of the problem, according to an article in the UK’s Management Issues News, is that hungover or tired white collar employees are usually not seen as dangerous and want to avoid being penalised for missing a day of work.
"An employee falling asleep at their desk is a lot less harmful than employees falling asleep in front of the wheel of a car, or indeed when operating machinery," says Peter Done, a partner with UK employment law firm Peninsula. "I think we have all been guilty of coming into work (with) a hangover but when it leads to tiredness... then one has to ask whether you should be in work at all."
A survey of more than 2,000 people by Peninsula — cunningly timed to coincide with England’s Euro 2004 match with Switzerland — found that 70 per cent of people in the UK admit to falling asleep on the job, while almost 80 per cent have taken a day off work to nurse a hangover. Peninsula also found that only a quarter owned up to taking hangover-related absence ‘several times’ during their working life, while one in ten said they had only done so once.
Research shows that it is light-to-moderate drinkers — not alcoholics — who cause the most productivity problems. One study in the US found that more than half of all light drinkers, and 87 per cent of light-to-moderate drinkers, cause problems in the workplace. The primary illness that affects these amateur drinkers is the hangover, not the long-term consequences of alcohol abuse, such as inflammation of the liver and heart disease. Chronic alcoholism is responsible for only a small proportion of the total societal cost of alcohol use, the researchers said. They also found that people with hangovers posed a danger to themselves and others long after their blood alcohol levels had returned to normal, suggesting that hangovers could be more insidious than actual inebriation.
Another survey found a positive relationship between the frequency of being ‘hungover’ at work and the frequency of feeling sick at work, sleeping on the job, and having problems with job tasks or co-workers. Drinking at work, problem drinking and frequency of getting ‘drunk’ in the past 30 days were positively associated with frequency of absenteeism, arriving late to work or leaving early, doing poor work, doing less work and arguing with co-workers.
The hangover effect was demonstrated among pilots whose performance was tested in flight simulators. There was evidence of impairment 14 hours after pilots reached blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) of between 0.10 per cent and 0.12 per cent. It was found that pilots were still significantly impaired 8 hours after reaching a BAC of 0.10 per cent.
One of the factors contributing to drinking mid-week is lack of motivation in the workplace. In fact, half of all employees — sober or otherwise — only put in enough effort to keep their jobs (known as ‘The Bare Minimum Effort’). Surveys in the UK have shown 70 per cent of employees are less motivated today than they used to be, and another 80 per cent could perform significantly better if they wanted to. What does all this mean? It means people are unhappy at work, and many overlook the importance of a fulfilling work life. Not only is it important for employees to be content, their happiness is important to their employers as well. Disgruntled employees perform considerably poorly compared to contented ones.
Workplace programmes to prevent and reduce alcohol-related problems among employees have considerable potential. For example, because employees spend a lot of time at work, co-workers and supervisors may have the opportunity to notice a developing alcohol problem. In addition, employers can use their influence to motivate employees to get help for an alcohol problem. However, employers rarely are in a position to prevent their employees from initiating drinking as an off-the-job lifestyle practice, nor do they desire to do so. At the same time, employers want their employees to perform their jobs well and not disrupt or endanger co-workers’ activities. A co-worker’s identification of an apparent alcohol problem should be used to refer an employee for workplace-based assistance.
Peninah, a waitress at a major restaurant in Nairobi, has developed various masking strategies for days when she’s under the weather. After a late night out, she says, she avoids getting close while serving the customers. "I chew lots of mint gums to kill the beer smell", she says, "as well as drinking lots of water to fight the dehydration."
She also makes a point of being very active: in case anyone notices something amiss, she argues, her work rate will surely dispel any suspicions of wrongdoing. She, however, is in a minority as few people have the energy to up their work rate when they are hungover.
If you have to drink during the work week, enjoy the night, know your limits, and if you have one drink too many, try some quick remedies so that you don’t end up staring at ceramic all day long.
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