Is Presenteeism more costly than Absenteeism?

Presenteeism is a recently coined term to describe employees who are physically present in work but who are less productive due to illness or difficulties they’re facing in their personal or professional lives. There are obvious concerns about quality of work, productivity and, depending on the industry, health and safety issues.

A report commissioned by Axa PPP Healthcare found that in a one month period more employees reported one day of sickness presence (45%) than those who reported one day of sickness absence (18%), and the research proved that sickness presence is more costly than sickness absence.

Causes

Among the key findings was that higher levels of sickness presence are associated with: lower manager assessed performance, reduced psychological wellbeing and higher levels of sickness absence, personal financial difficulties, work-related stress and perceived workplace pressure to attend work when unwell.  The culture of discouraging sickness absence because of the costs to the business makes conscientious employees drag themselves into work.

It’s likely that smaller organisations and those that don’t pay employees for the first few days of absence are more at risk of presenteeism. Although they tend to record fewer reported sickness absence days than their larger counterparts who offer more comprehensive sickness policies, employees of smaller businesses are more likely to come into work before they’re well enough so that they don’t lose pay or the support of their colleagues.

Costs

The impact of an employee who is in work but distracted, anxious, depressed and less productive than they would ordinarily be is, all too often, underestimated.  While the impact of presenteeism on an organisation is difficult to measure when compared with, for example, absenteeism, conservative estimates attribute it as having over 1.5 times the financial impact of sickness absence in the UK

Management

There has been much guidance about managing sickness absence, but it may be more cost effective to look carefully at your employees sickness records for their presence.  You can look for obvious patterns such as frequent absence on Monday to recover from the weekend, or any regularity to days off.  But if someone is rarely absent, are they unusually healthy or are they coming to work when they would be better recovering at home or dealing with their problems?