Challenge of Cancer in the Workplace

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Most Human Resources professionals face a particular difficulty in crafting an approach to managing through cancer. The needs of employees and managers trying to work through this issue are for unique, customized and counter-intuitive solutions. In short, they want help managing difference in an environment that has prided itself on uniformity, consistency and some degree of rigidity. The notion of "the same thing for everyone still guides much policy-making and interpretation.

But employees with cancer challenge these assumptions in many ways.
They want to work as much and as normally as possible.
Most don't want leaves of absence; they want to work.
They need time off for treatment; they need their full salaries.
They need flexible schedules - part-time, work-at-home.
They are overwhelmed with insurance claims, and exhausted.

In the face of these contradictory needs, HR must craft an approach that makes sense, including a way of helping managers keep their employee with cancer and all co-workers engaged throughout this process. In doing so, it is crucial to integrate managing for the short-term with managing for the long-term interest of the employee and the work group.

The Managing Through Cancer Principles offer a way to reconcile the demands for consistent policy with the manager's need to keep an at-risk employee engaged and motivated. A central assumption in this approach is that the manager is best positioned to make certain judgments about time off and compensation, and how to balance the typically short-term demands of treatment and the long-term contributions of the employee. The manager is also likely the best judge of how his treatment of the employee with cancer will affect the work group. Because the journey through cancer is a life-and-death experience, co-workers watch it carefully to see the company's values in action. It is a testing time all around.

The test for HR is to promote supportive policies and to form a partnership with managers and employees, in which it is a coach and advisor rather than a distant interpreter of rules. The Principles offer a framework for such an approach.