Presenteeism: The evil flip side of absenteeism
By: Carlos Quintana
Tags: Human Resources, Employees, Employee Engagement, Management And Leadership, Workforce

For years, companies have discouraged absences in the workplace. However, being present when unfit is increasingly becoming the new Frankenstein of the corporate world.

It’s Monday morning, the alarm just went off and you need to get ready for work. However, this is not your average Monday morning. Your body hurts and you don’t feel well at all. In just a blink of an eye, the question pops up in your mind: To go or not to go? To be absent and sick at home or to be present and sick at the office? No worries, regardless of what you do, either choice will generate a cost for your company.

For a long time, however, companies have seen absences as the only problem to solve in the workplace. While available data is often contradictory, the attention that companies have placed on excessive absences at work (absenteeism) seems to be working. In the UK, for example, and according to the 2018 Health and well-being at work report produced by CIPD and Simplyhealth, there has been a significant downward trend in average absence rates from 7.7 days in 2011 to 6.6 days in 2018.

That should be good news, right? Not too fast. While absenteeism seems to be falling, the number of people going to work while unfit (presenteeism) has significantly increased in the last years. In fact, only in the UK and “within the space of eight years, the number of people suffering from presenteeism has tripled,” argues Professor Cary Cooper, President of the CIPD.

Both absenteeism and presenteeism pose significant costs for companies. But how do you know if your employees are adopting one behavior or the other?

What is employee absenteeism?

According to The Balance Careers, a provider of financial services, absenteeism is “a pattern of missing work in which an employee is habitually or frequently absent from work.” Behind that behavior, there are many reasons that can be grouped in two main categories:

Planned absenteeism — Excused absences granted by the employer such as annual leave, vacation time, government services leave or planned medical treatments. Unplanned absenteeism — Unplanned/emergency absences that can be involuntary (e.g. unavoidable illnesses, injuries) or voluntary (e.g. taking care of relatives, low job satisfaction).

Considering the above, your focus should be placed on unplanned absenteeism as a behavior that emerges from two key factors: the ability to attend (e.g. having an unexpected injury) and the motivation to attend (e.g. being overly stressed at work).

What is presenteeism at work?

Presenteeism is a pattern of going to work when not feeling good physically or psychologically, something that has a negative impact in the employee’s productivity as well as that of the company or organization the employee belongs to.

While presenteeism is on the rise today, the study of this phenomenon has significantly changed in the last fifteen years moving from over-engagement in the workplace to showing up at work when ill.

In his essay in The Cambridge Companion to Presenteeism at Work, Eric Gosselin argues that most people treat presenteeism today as a phenomenon that requires two variables: “the worker having a health problem and still being present at work despite that condition.” However, Gosselin says that such an idea overlooks a very important aspect related to presenteeism: the lack of productivity inherent to this phenomenon.

Because of that, Gosselin argues that the following three conditions are necessary in order to consider a worker’s behaviour as presenteeism:

1. Be ill (physically or psychologically).

2. Be at work.

3. Exhibit decreased productivity.

Similarly, in the foreword of Professor Hesan Quazi’s book on presenteeism, Professor Wee Chow Hou states that this phenomenon has been viewed from two different angles:

Sickness presenteeism — The practice of coming to work despite illness, injury, anxiety, and so on, which results in reduced productivity.

Non-sickness presenteeism — The practice of working long hours without the real need to do so.

With that being said, your focus should be placed on dealing with sickness presenteeism, which is also compatible with the conditions exposed by Gosselin.

However, we can add to this analysis another condition that can be considered a precursory practice to presenteeism: unconsciously favor quantity to quality. When people aren’t necessarily sick but they go to work out of fear of losing their jobs or simply to show that they are good employees, they are favoring quantity over quality and that behavior can easily lead to presenteeism.

A new threat: Leavism

Parallel to absenteeism and presenteeism, it is worth to say a word about leavism. As defined by Professor Cary Cooper, “leavism” occurs when an employee uses his/her leave time to get work done. Considering that everyone needs time to rest and recuperate especially in today’s work environment, leavism can severely affect the health and well-being of individuals and incidentally the productivity of the company itself.

Unfortunately, leavism is a very general practice today. For instance, the Health and Well-being at Work report found out that two-thirds of companies in the UK noticed leavism among their employees.

A holistic approach to absenteeism and presenteeism

Traditionally speaking, absenteeism and presenteeism have been studied as two isolated phenomena. However, nowadays more people are in favor of a holistic approach where you can bring together these two behaviors. In his essay about presenteeism, Gosselin provides two reasons that support that approach: the complementarity effect and the substitution effect.

The complementarity effect suggest that one behavior follows the other. Going to work sick (presenteeism) at some point will probably transform into absenteeism and vice versa. In fact,

“presenteeism today can be considered a warning sign of future absenteeism.”

On the contrary, the substitution effect says that if one phenomenon takes place, the other doesn’t occur. In other words, you are either present or absent from work. However, the direction of the substitution has been interpreted in only one direction, “with absenteeism behavior replaced by presenteeism behavior.”

In one way or the other, we can see that there is a strong link between both behaviors. As stated by Gosselin, absenteeism and presenteeism are “behavioral variants originating from concurrent realities”.

An article on presenteeism published in the blog of the Canadian company Solutions & Co. argues that “presenteeism is the result of the valorization of diligence at work aimed at reducing absenteeism, in comparison to which it is still excessive — proportionally and inversely opposed.” In other words, presenteeism “is the flip side of the coin.”

There is only one problem with that coin, though: each side has a very different cost! In fact, while data is often contradictory, everyone agrees that the costs of presenteeism are a lot higher than the costs of absenteeism, which is quite alarming considering the dramatic increase of the former during the last years. Presenteeism is, indeed, the evil flip side of absenteeism. Is there any way to fight that? Of course! And the best way to do it is by building a corporate culture that is focused around your employee’s well-being. Only by doing that, you can effectively deal with this new corporate Frankestein.