3 Reasons to Tell Your Employer About Your Diabetes

An employee is required to inform an employer of any health problems when they apply for a job. This is so that the employer can make allowances for them rather than discriminate against the fact. However, should an employee be diagnosed with a medical condition once they are employed, they may feel embarrassed about disclosing the fact and so hide their condition from their employer. This is not helpful because it may have an impact on productivity and their work.

Also, employers will be looking to have a good enps score and can hardly achieve that if employees do not trust their employers enough to be understanding about their diabetes. Enps stands for Employer Net Promoter Score. It is a measure of how likely an employee is to promote their company’s products to someone else. Imagine how willing the employee would be to sing the praises of their employer and the company products if the employer had fully understood the needs of their diabetes and has allowed for all of them?

Enps Score

An employer has a duty of care to an employee and can only be good at that when they know the full facts about an employee medically. For instance, with diabetes, an employee will need to allow time in the working day for an employee to take their insulin, where this is required. They will need to know why productivity might be affected by tiredness. A good employer will, however, want to work around an employee’s diabetes and understand why sometimes an employee might feel one hundred percent.

The enps score, as mentioned above, is a valuable tool that will measure how satisfied an employee is with their employer. This will include how well they handle their diabetes. It is so much easier to manage, in particular, type 1 diabetes when an employer is on board with it. A sufferer is likely to attend more doctor’s appointments during work time, for example.

The result of an employer being understanding about an employee’s diabetes is that the employee will give in return all they can to the employer in terms of maximum work effort. They will even go so far as to recommend what their company sells to others. It is all about having a satisfied employee.

In terms of the enps score an employer will look to achieve, it should be above zero and ideally something between 10 and 30. If you follow the link above, it will explain more. To conclude this point, though, the fact is that employers want to be told about diabetes so that they can better cater to the needs of the employee and, at the same time, increase their enps score.

Taking Medication

With diabetes, particularly, a worker needs to tell their employer that they have the condition so that they can regularly test themselves throughout the working day without having to carry it out in a covert way. It is good to be open about it rather than sneak off into toilets to do it. An employer may not, anyway, allow a toilet break as and when an employee wants it, depending on working practices.

Diabetics must test if their blood sugars are too low so as not to end up having a “hypo”, as it is termed. This stands for hypoglycaemia. This will mainly apply to diabetics who take insulin. It can be dangerous to have a low blood sugar level and can ultimately end with a diabetic going into a coma, worst-case scenario. It can be reversed if caught in time by the diabetic eating something surgery or taking their medication. Therefore, close monitoring of the condition is important, and this can only be achieved through regular monitoring at work as well as at home.

Medical Appointments

Informing an employer about diabetes will pave the way when time off is needed to see a doctor or diabetic nurse. Doctors will want to keep an eye on anyone suffering from diabetes because of the other complications there can be from the condition. For instance, a diabetes sufferer may also need to be kept an eye on with regards to foot damage, eye damage, skin conditions, hearing impairment, nerve damage, kidney damage, cardiovascular disease, or increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Thankfully, well-managed diabetics will not encounter the worst of this list. It also depends on the severity of diabetes. Generally, type 1 is the most severe kind, requiring regular insulin injections, and type 2 is a milder form of diabetes that can often be diet controlled and so may not even require tablets. If this is the case it is good to tell your employer so that you can eat during your working day and not have to wait until break time or lunchtime.

So, an employer will want to know about diabetes. This is in part so that employees are satisfied, which is measured by an enps score. Satisfied workers are more productive and more likely to recommend a company’s products than not. Also, when diabetes is known about, an employer can allow for it when it comes to a diabetes sufferer checking on blood sugar levels regularly and adjusting them with food intake or medications. It makes it easier, too, and less unexpected when medical appointments are requested.