Presenteeism: How Sneezes and Coughs Can Sicken the Bottom Line

The last time you were wheezing, sneezing and plagued by body-racking coughs, what did you do? Did you take off the three to five days you needed to recover and come back to work only when you felt like you'd successfully risen from the dead? Or, did you go to work sick?

If you went to work sick, then you joined the nearly 90 percent of employees in a recent LifeCare ® Inc. poll who admitted to working sick. In fact, the practice of coming to work when you're ill, called "presenteeism," is a workplace trend that may be growing despite people's well-developed fears of catching the flu in a season plagued by a shortage of flu shots.

It's a trend which more employers are also becoming increasingly alarmed. Employees' willingness to come to work looking like death warmed over may be noble, but companies are recognizing that work from an employee who's chock full of contagious germs is no real gift.

"You get people who drag themselves in looking pale and weak ," said Gail Jern, Westaff Human Resources Manager. "You tell them to go home and they say, 'I can't!' because maybe they're working on a project with a tight deadline. While the company probably appreciates their dedication to their work, the fact is they need to go home and take care of themselves and come back when they're not contagious."

Employers who don't send their sick employees home end up paying a heavy price. Work-till-you-drop employees prolong their own illnesses and infect others. In fact, presenteeism is costing companies as much as $150 billion per year in lost productivity, higher health-care expenses and cascading absences caused by contagion, according to a recent report in the Harvard Business Review.

"It's really in no one's best interest if an employee comes to work sick or avoids taking vacation time," said Peter G. Burki, CEO and co-founder of LifeCare® Inc., a Westport, Connecticut-based national employee benefits organization. "After all, ill and exhausted employees simply aren't going to be productive. And, employees with contagious conditions, such as the flu, put coworkers at risk for illness."

So why do so many of us insist on coming to work when we shouldn't?

According to the LifeCare employee poll, Jern was right when she singled out conscientiousness as our biggest motivation:

• 27 percent show up out of a sense of obligation — they're worried about their workload
• 24 percent feel it's too 'risky' to be absent (they're concerned they'll suffer some negative consequence)
• 17 percent want to save their sick time for child care emergencies
• 18 percent had a variety of other motives

There may be other factors fueling the presenteeism trend. For example, some employers have been trimming sick days. The practice has left employees with a smaller bank of days to use and more anxiety about depleting all of their allowed leave at the beginning of the year, which is the height of the flu season. Also, the number of employers who allow employees to carry over sick time from one year to the next has dropped from 51 percent in 2000 to 37 percent in 2004, according to a survey by CCH INCORPORATED, an Illinois-based employment law and human resources consultant.

Because of the high costs involved, presenteeism is now on the agenda of human resources departments around the country. In the CCH survey, 39 percent of employers cited presenteeism as a problem in their organization.

"A lot of companies are starting to take a good, hard look at this," said Paul Gibson, Vice President of Human Resources Information Services at CCH. "After all the downsizing, the consequences of bringing the flu to the workplace and infecting the remaining workers are greater than before."

Among the steps employers can take to reduce presenteeism is encouraging senior managers to "walk the talk." (See Side Story.) Managers can show employees through personal example that it's okay to use sick days and vacation time and they can remind their employees about their benefits.

Many employers — 63 percent according to CCH — are also offering a Paid Leave Bank, also known as Paid Time Off (PTO). Under the program, personal, vacation and sick days are combined into a single bank of days that the employee can use in any way he or she needs.

This new, more flexible approach to sick days, experts say, won't just help create a happier, less-sneezey workforce. Reducing presenteeism will also create a more productive force.