Ann Hawkins EdD
Founder and Chief Visionary Officer 24hr Virtual Clinic™
In 1964, Bob Dylan recorded – “The Times They Are a Changing” – and changes are on the horizon in
workers’ compensation. Some elements of the changes involve Total Employee Health – physical and
mental – and how health can influence safety and a reduction of on-the-job injuries. Corporate interest
in health and safety, like advancing other aspects of employee work environment, almost always
translates into a tangible ROI in better company productivity or service. Currently, many companies
place health and well being in the Benefits or HR silo and safety in Risk or Work Comp silo – two
different silos within the company – and in some instances two silos which don’t converse. Integration
of Total Employee Health positively affects the corporate bottom line – the silo doesn’t matter!
Industrial Safety and Hygiene News (May 2017) stated: “An integrated health and safety program is no
longer an operations cost to be controlled but an investment in a company’s overall effort to improved
profitability and competitiveness.”
Let’s look at three of the more critical health/safety issues – stress, presenteeism, and absenteeism –
and see how integrated Total Employee Health improves a company’s profitability and competitiveness.
Stress – if you had to classify stress, would it be a health or safety issue? Yes, stress is both a health and
safety dilemma. For the most part, no one can see stress, but stress definitely affects employees lack of
concentration and efficiency which many times leads to incidents and accidents at the workplace. Stress
affects all levels of employees – a mistyped word or miscalculated financial analysis due to stress and
lack of concentration at the C suite level, an ongoing “pain in the neck,” a musculoskeletal disorder
(MSD) aggravated by stress at the workstation, a lifting injury, or slip and fall on the work floor due to
lack of focus or training. The Mayo Clinic, in a published article (April 28, 2016), determined that stress
left unchecked can contribute to many health problems, such as high blood pressure, heart disease,
obesity, and diabetes.
Stress.org determined that 46% of workers are stressed about workload, 28% because of people issues
at work, 20% due to life/work balance issues and 6% because of lack of job security. The result for the
US is over $300 billion spent annually due to:
• Accidents
• Absenteeism
• Employee Turnover
• Diminished Productity
• Direct costs related to medical, legal and insurance
In these incidents, the cause of stress could be viewed as a safety issue and the effect as a health
problem. So, once again, is stress a health or a safety issue?
Presenteeism, not included in the above list, is when employees are at work “in body” but not “in
mind.” Causes of presenteeism are typically attributed to or associated with illness, injury, pain, anxiety,
depression and work/life balance issues related to the employee, the spouse, children or senior parents.
Presenteeism is anything which takes the employee’s mind off the “job” at hand. Harvard Business
Review reported 80% of workers have reported experiencing presenteeism.
Presenteeism costs employers 10 times more than absenteeism! EHSToday (March 2016), found that
employees take 4 days off per year for sick time, but admit being unproductive 57.5 days a year, almost
3 months of being at work but not being at work. Imagine if your workforce, across the board, was not
completely focused at work 60 days a year but is still making decisions, manufacturing product and
dealing with customers. It is next to impossible to determine the number or percent of accidents and
injuries which happen during those “semi-conscious” 3 months spent at work and not mentally being
there!
In the UK, almost nine in ten (86%) of the over 1,000 respondents to the Chartered Institute of
Personnel and Development survey, compiled May 2018, observed presenteeism in their organization
over the last 12 months. In 2010, the figure was just 26%, rising to 72% in 2016. The British work less
hours than the US, 1,676 hours per year and Americans 1,783 hours. Presenteeism is prevalent around
the world.
A 2008 academic study, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23569693_Well-being_-
_Absenteeism_presenteeism_costs_and_challenges, completed in the UK determined that stress,
depression or anxiety accounted for 13.8 million days lost or 46% of all reported illnesses making this
the single largest cause of all absences attributable to work-related illness. From 2003-2008, workrelated
stress, depression or anxiety remained for each year the single most reported complaint. These
studies are compiled in a country which operates under a socialized medicine model where everyone
has healthcare access with no deductible or premium.
Psychosocial issues, a state of mental, emotional, social, and spiritual well-being, are reflected in
presenteeism. Hartford Insurance analyzed claims from 2002 to 2015 and found that 10% of claims had
at least one psychosocial issue which accounted for 60% of claims costs – presenteeism is a costly issue
to any company. http://www.businessinsurance.com/article/20170306/NEWS08/912312232/Detectingmental-health-issues-can-cut-workers-comp-claims-costs
Like stress, presenteeism is real and has a negative productivity and financial effect on your company.
Again, the question is – is this cost related to employee health or safety – again the answer is yes.
Absenteeism due to stress, presenteeism, illness or pain hinders productivity and consistency of work.
The workplace would be safer if those who are ill would stay home. When a sick worker comes to work
over half the workplace surfaces are contaminated by lunchtime. Productivity drops by only 28% when
employees stay home sick compared to a 72% drop when they try to gut it out and keep working.
www.nolo.com/legal…/could-poor-employee-health-be-29914.htm
As an example, worker A comes to work sick and workers B, C, and D get sick. Is that a workplace illness?
Employees B, C, and D come to work sick – and productivity drops by 72% times 3. Then, worker A’s
child goes to school sick and contaminates the entire 1st grade – now workers B, C, and D stay home to
take care of their sick child. Plus, the average wait time of 29.3 days to see a doctor only adds to the
depression, anxiety, and aggravation of the worker https://www.beckershospitalreview.com (March2017).
According to “Absenteeism: The Bottom-Line Killer,” unscheduled absenteeism costs roughly $3,600 per
year for each hourly worker and $2,650 each year for salaried employees. These costs can be directly
attributed to wages paid to absent employees, high-cost replacement workers (overtime pay for other
employees and/or temporary workers), using absenteeism as a form of “disengagement” from work and
a raise in administrative costs of managing absenteeism. Indirect costs include: lower quality of
goods/services resulting from overtime fatigue or understaffing, reduced productivity, excess manager
safety issues (inadequately trained employees filling in for others, rushing to catch up after arriving as a
replacement, etc.), and low morale among employees who have to “fill in” or do extra work to cover
absent coworkers. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/070513/causes-and-costsabsenteeism.asp
Yet again, is absenteeism a result of safety in the workplace because of conditions such as contaminated
work surfaces, and the negative impact on the worker staying home and not gutting it out?
“These Times They Are a Changing” invites new opportunities and solutions which are good for
employers, employees and their families. The opportunity is for the C suite, Health, Safety and Human
Resources to work together, move out of their silo’s into an open floor plan. The solution is Total
Employee Health empowering all employees with simple to use and accessible tools which allow them
to be as productive as they want to be and understand that – yes – health affects safety and safety
affects health. The result of this well-facilitated program is decreased stress, presenteeism and
absenteeism and an employer group who works to the best of their ability thus increasing productivity,
commitment to the job and most importantly the bottom line.
