‘Bums on seats’ cost £15bn a year – do you have a presenteeism problem?
The cost of absence and sickness to UK organisations is well documented1 – with the HSE estimating 32.9 days lost each year and 2.3m UK employees absent because of work-related illness. Harder to pin down are the costs of ‘presenteeism’, in other words, turning up to work when sick people should be at home because they are too ill to work, or merely being present at work without being productive. Examples of this include browsing the internet, using social networking sites, making personal calls or dragging out activities in an inefficient way. Woody Allen immortalised the concept with his announcement that ‘80% of success is just showing up’.
Robertson Cooper’s second Business Well-Being Network Annual Report2 launched at their annual conference on 11 November 2009 and includes a report that one of the key findings of the Foresight project on mental capital and well-being3 (Professor Cary Cooper was lead scientist on this) was that presenteeism is a major blocker to productivity in the UK and world economy. Foresight has reported this could cost the UK around £900m a year, but the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health had it down as rather more – just over £15bn 4.
The report looks at research conducted to date but makes the point that absenteeism has been studied for much longer than presenteeism, making it harder to find solutions. Hanse and Anderson (2008)5 have identified three main types of presenteeism:
- Work related. This includes time pressures, level of control and job security. If people feel the job demands them to turn up they will do so even if they are unwell.
- Personal circumstances. This includes struggling on at work because of personal finances, stressors at home related to increased work hours and personality factors. If people do not feel they can relax at home or their personality drives them to remain at work, they will do so even if they are sick.
- Ethics and attitude. People feel that their job is too important to have a day off or they feel they don’t have the right to take the time off, so they turn up. Welfare and education sectors are prone to this because of the sense of responsibility towards service users.
Robertson Cooper recommend that managers and employees are made aware of the negative effects of coming to work whilst unwell and that organisations should ‘increase the awareness of presenteesim and include it in any work that is carried out to improve engagement and wellbeing.’ They also advocate looking at how to improve performance measurement, rather than relying on face-time in the office as a measure of productivity, citing the example of an individual who is rewarded by getting better grades in their annual appraisal because of working long unproductive hours just to impress the boss.
The other issue affecting presenteeism is the engagement of employees in what their organisation is trying to achieve in the first place. At the same event, David Macleod told delegates that the recommendations to the government in his review with Nita Clarke, Engaging for Success6 were founded on the basic problem that while there are some exemplar organisations, there are not enough of them and too many organisations think employee engagement is solved by sending out opinion surveys rather than any drive for culture change coming from the top. The recommendations are:
- Launch of a national awareness campaign. This is to highlight the potential benefits of employee engagement and to share good practice and insight.
- Aligning resources. This means the government, its agencies and delivery partners need to collaborate to support and build on each other’s work. This would include sector skills councils, Acas and the UK Commission for Employment and Skills.
- Increasing support. To improve the quality and quantity of practical support from 2010, a practitioner forum and a specialist forum (including David Guest of Kings College London and Mike Emmott of the CIPD) were proposed.
Lord Mandelson has accepted all three recommendations. David Macleod told The People Bulletin that the list was restricted to three to maximise likely adoption. In his talk he made the point that engagement – i.e. wanting to do it could sometimes be at odds with alignment (knowing what to do). ‘We want people to “get it”,’ he said. The best case scenario was the ‘high flying’ group with high levels of engagement aligned to the organisation’s objectives, and the worst case being ‘bookends’ with little engagement or alignment. But the most common types of employees across all sectors were ‘tin soldiers’ (highly aligned but disengaged) who outnumber the engaged but not at all aligned ‘headless chickens’ by three to one. Key enablers, he found were the following factors:
- Leadership provides a strong strategic narrative giving a line of sight between the job and the organisation’s vision
- Engaging managers who offer clarity and training, treading people as individuals, who listen and encourage and who ensure work is organised efficiently.
- There is employee voice in the organisation for reinforcing and challenging views.
- There is organisational integrity in that values are actually reflected in behaviour.
[1] The HSE publishes a useful set of statistics monitoring days lost to sickness each year and the cost to the UK economy: www.hse.gov.uk/costs/ill_health_costs/ill_health_costs_intro.asp#section3
[2] www.robertsoncooper.com/Pages/Marketing/Business-Wellbeing-Network.aspx
[5] Hanse, C. D. and Andersen, J. H. (2008): Going ill to work – What personal circumstances, attitudes and work-related factors are associated with sickness presenteeism? Social Science and Medicine, 67, 956-964.
