Four days. That is how long the average employee in a 2016 workplace study stayed away from work in a year. The same people admitted to being unproductive on the job for 57.5 days, close to three working months.
The figures come from a report by Global Corporate Challenge (GCC), a workplace health company, which surveyed nearly 2,000 employees. It measured the results against the World Health Organization’s Workplace Health and Productivity Questionnaire. The subject was presenteeism: turning up to work but not performing at full capacity.
Ten times the cost
The report put the price of staff who are absent at around USD $150 billion a year. Staff who showed up but weren’t fully productive cost USD $1,500 billion.
Olivia Sackett, a data scientist at GCC Insights, said she was surprised at first. Then she did the arithmetic. “Although 57.5 days per year sounds very high, it corresponds to a person working at 75 percent of their maximum productivity level,” she said. What caught her off guard was the gap with absenteeism, and that so few people were talking about it.
Employers lean on absence rates because they are easy to count, she said. “If your employee is at their desk or on the work site, you can tick a box.” Presenteeism is harder to quantify, but Sackett said tools such as the WHO questionnaire have shown they work.
Stress, money and stigma
David Batman, GCC’s chief medical officer and an occupational health specialist, wants the conversation turned around. “We need to stop talking about how many sick days people are taking and focus our energy on what they’re doing when they’re actually at work,” he said.
He pointed to the 2008 financial crisis as one source of stress. “The world of work has become increasingly insecure,” Batman said, adding that many people struggle to cover their financial demands.
The bigger problem, in his view, is the stigma around mental illness. Workers with depression or anxiety fear being seen as failures, so they stay at their desks. Those conditions disturb sleep, he said, and that brings fatigue and weaker concentration and memory. The result is employees who arrive “far from full mental and intellectual capacity.”
His advice to managers is simple. Pay attention when you notice something has changed. If someone’s engagement drops or they seem unconcerned about outcomes, he said, you may have a problem and you will need to act. He also argued that companies should not penalise people for reporting health or personal issues, since those issues affect colleagues too.
A fix that worked quickly
Unlike absenteeism, Sackett said, presenteeism responds to quick fixes. In the report, employees who took part in GCC’s health program gained the equivalent of 10 days of lost time on average. They also reported better sleep, lower stress and more happiness by the end.
“Employees were spending more of the time they were at work actually working, and they were enjoying it more,” Sackett said.
