Present and incorrect

15 Oct

Presenteeism is the most expensive thing on your payroll that never appears in a report.

Poor mental health costs UK employers £1,676 a year for every person on the payroll. The biggest single slice of that, £788, comes from presenteeism: people who turned up, logged on, and spent the day running at half speed. That’s more than 3 times what the same employers lose to absence.

Sick days are the part everyone measures. Last year the average UK worker took 4.4 of them, each one logged, totted up and taken to the board. The bigger number belongs to the people who did turn up.

What presenteeism is.

Presenteeism is the productivity lost when people are at work, in the building or logged in, while running well below capacity. It comes in 3 broad flavours.

Sickness presenteeism. The streaming cold at the desk, the migraine on mute, the chronic condition nobody mentions.

Mental and emotional presenteeism. Stress, anxiety, low mood or burnout that turns a 2-hour task into a day.

Facade presenteeism. The green dot on Teams. Visible, responsive within 4 minutes, and producing very little.

The third is the one most leaders recognise instantly. In other organisations.

What it costs.

Deloitte puts the annual cost of poor mental health to UK employers at £50.6bn. Presenteeism is the largest slice at £23.8bn, more than 3 times the £7.3bn lost to absence. Turnover accounts for the other £19.5bn.

Divide those figures by the UK’s 30.2 million payrolled employees and you get the £1,676 per head: £788 presenteeism, £646 turnover and £242 absence.

For a team of 100, that’s £78,800 a year in presenteeism alone, and £167,600 all in. To run it for your own organisation, multiply your headcount by £1,676.

It’s a cautious figure. Deloitte’s data predates 2 years of pay rises, and it counts mental health only. The colleague coughing over the kettle in February is extra.

Why people do it.

Nobody drags themselves in with a temperature for fun. The reasons are usually some mix of these.

Fear. Of looking uncommitted, missing the promotion, landing on the wrong list.
Money. Sick pay that won’t cover the rent.
Guilt. The work doesn’t vanish. It lands on a colleague who is also stretched.
Culture. The director who answers emails from a hospital bed, and the perfect attendance award nobody asked for.

There’s a quieter fifth. 61% of people say they feel pressure to appear well. Even wellbeing has become something to perform.

Why it’s so hard to see.

Absence shows up in the HR system. Presenteeism shows up as a slightly worse decision, a slightly slower week, a meeting that goes round twice. None of it gets its own line in the accounts.

The mechanism is physiological. Under acute stress, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain handling planning, judgement and working memory, goes offline in stages. People under stress also make riskier, less advantageous decisions.

And it travels. In one study, simply watching someone go through a stressful task raised cortisol in around a quarter of the people observing. One dysregulated manager can set the temperature for a whole floor, which matters when 46% of UK workers say they felt a lot of stress the previous day.

What actually helps.

2 levers: policy and physiology.

Policy first. Make sick leave something people can actually use, and have senior people seen using it. Stop rewarding visible busyness. Train managers to notice capacity as well as attendance; only 29% of UK line managers have had any mental health training.

Then physiology. Policy decides what people are allowed to do. The state they’re in when they sit down at nine is a separate matter, and it’s where most wellbeing spend misses. A study of more than 46,000 UK workers found no evidence that people using individual-level offers such as wellbeing apps and resilience classes were any better off than colleagues who weren’t.

Breath is the most direct handle anyone has on their own nervous system. Slow breathing, around 6 breaths a minute, is linked to greater parasympathetic activity and lower anxiety. It’s trainable, it costs nothing, and it works at a desk between meetings. Deloitte’s own analysis finds that earlier, organisation-wide approaches return more than late-stage support, at an average of £4.70 for every £1 spent.

That’s the work we do at Worker Be: breathwork and coaching for teams, wherever and whenever they need it.

The Working Well assessment shows you where your organisation sits and what presenteeism is likely costing you. Your Working Well briefing, with the full cost model, follows by email.

Take the Working Well assessment today. workerbe.co.uk/working-well

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