Wednesday · 29 July 2020

Presenteeism and the half-worked day

Posted by Call In Sick Tips Revealed · Filed under Workplace · Permalink

Presenteeism is the word for being at work while unfit to do it, and it is the mirror image of the problem most absence policies were written to solve. A workplace can drive its absence figures down to almost nothing and be worse off, because the days did not disappear; they were merely spent at a desk.

The reason it is hard to manage is that it is invisible in exactly the places where absence is visible. Nobody files a form. The timesheet is full. The only trace is in the quality of the output, which is generally noticed later and attributed to something else.

What produces it

Three conditions reliably produce presenteeism. The first is a policy that counts absences rather than weighing them, so that a single day carries a permanent mark. The second is work that nobody else can do, which turns a day off into a debt rather than a gap. The third is simple ambiguity: when nobody has said what counts as ill enough, most people resolve the doubt by turning up.

Remote arrangements added a fourth. When attendance means being reachable rather than being present, the threshold for turning up drops almost to nothing. A person who would never have travelled to an office while unwell will open a laptop in bed, and will describe the day afterwards as having worked, which by any useful measure it was not.

Measuring the unmeasurable

Attempts to quantify presenteeism run into an obvious difficulty: the only witness is the person doing the degraded work, and self-assessment of one's own concentration while unwell is not reliable. Rather than measure it, some organisations look for its fingerprints instead. Rework rates, errors caught late, tasks that took twice as long as their estimate for no recorded reason.

The practical response tends to be structural rather than exhortatory. Telling people not to work while ill has little effect when the underlying incentives are unchanged. Removing the incentives has more: cross-training so that no task has a single owner, absence records that distinguish patterns from isolated days, and managers who visibly take time away themselves.

The last of those is the one most often skipped and the one people watch most closely. A policy is a document; a manager working through a fever on a video call is an instruction.