Long Covid at Work: A Manager’s Guide

It’s time for organizations to be inclusive of employees with chronic illnesses. Here’s how.

by

and

Beth Pollack

by

and

Beth Pollack

May 07, 2024 · Long read

01

Long Covid at Work: A Manager’s Guide

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How to Weigh the Risks of Disclosing a Disability

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Survey: How People Experience Chronic Illness at Work

Summary.

Nearly 18 million U.S. adults have long Covid, a multisystem illness that sometimes appears after a bout of Covid-19. Its wide range of symptoms vary from person to person, veer from mild to severe, and can wax and wane over time. There are no official treatments for long Covid; while some people see their symptoms resolve, others remain chronically ill. For those employees, the right workplace support can be transformative. Employers must not only help these individual employees but also build disability inclusion into their cultures and talent practices. A menu of accommodations along with individual job redesign efforts will help companies retain employees with long Covid and other chronic illnesses and enable them to contribute more than they could otherwise.

Before the pandemic, Dara was a research engineer, thriving in a job that involved complex technical design and problem-solving. (Names in this article have been changed for privacy.) She was also an avid baker and a voracious reader. Then in March 2020, she got Covid-19. Even after the acute illness had passed, many symptoms remained: Dara struggled to sit up for more than half an hour, was too breathless and lightheaded to walk even short distances, and had severe brain fog that left her unable to hold a conversation or write an email. She used all of her paid and unpaid leave to rest and try to recover. Eventually she improved enough to return to work — but she knew her job needed to change.

Katie Bach works with companies to improve job quality and employee experience. She has written extensively about the labor market impact of long Covid, including as a former nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and serves as board chair of PolyBio Research Foundation, which focuses on complex chronic conditions. Follow her on LinkedIn.
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Ludmila N. Praslova, PhD, SHRM-SCP, uses her extensive experience with neurodiversity and global and cultural inclusion to help create talent-rich workplaces. The author of The Canary Code, she is a professor of graduate industrial-organizational psychology and the accreditation liaison officer at Vanguard University of Southern California. Follow Ludmila on LinkedIn.
Beth Pollack is a research scientist at MIT. She studies long Covid and associated illnesses and leads research on their overlaps and shared pathophysiology in MIT’s Tal Research Group. Beth is the chair of the ME/CFS Less Studied Pathologies Subgroup and a member of the ME/CFS Research Roadmap Working Group at the National Institutes of Health, working to create a national plan to advance research on the illness toward clinical trials. Currently collaborating on three clinical studies on long Covid and associated chronic illnesses, she is a member of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative and a former senior researcher at Harvard University. Follow Beth on LinkedIn.

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