The pressure to show up to a job even when sick isn’t just bad for workers—it’s possibly bad for employers, too. According to a study published on September 13 in Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, “presenteeism” doesn’t ensure continual productivity and profit. If anything, it can make workplaces worse off while cumulatively losing billions of dollars in the process.
The research was led by Claire Smith, a University of South Florida assistant professor of psychology, who developed a new, 11-attribute assessment called the Presenteeism Pressure Scale. This survey asked respondents to rate on a scale of 1-to-7 various feelings as they related to their jobs. These included prompts such as:
- People who use sick or mental health days are looked down on in my organization.
- I am expected to work even if I’m not feeling well.
- It is uncommon for employees to take sick or mental health days at my organization.
Smith then gathered responses from hundreds of participants spread across four groups taking separate surveys. At her project’s conclusion, Smith found that a chronic expectation to work through illnesses is often far more detrimental to an organization than simply allowing people to stay at home and rest.
In one study of 764 workers, for example, many said they participated in presenteeism not only due to their own motivations, but because their place of employment made it feel expected of them. Another sample group of over 800 individuals indicated that such pressures caused them to evaluate their organizations negatively—feelings that often led to less job satisfaction and commitment. Yet another group of 350 volunteers took those feelings a step further. In reviewing their results, Smith documented upticks in not just unproductive, but “deviant” behavior, such as mistreatment of coworkers, theft, and higher turnover rates.
An accompanying announcement for the study cites the potentially “staggering” toll of presenteeism through the Harvard Business Review, which estimated the detrimental trend costs US workplaces as much as $150 billion every year.
[Related: Study confirms that thinking hard is unpleasant.]
Smith made sure to note in her study that “the characteristics of individual workers (e.g., need for social approval) and the nature of their jobs (e.g., high-performance standards) cannot entirely be blamed for the sizable and growing issue that is presenteeism.” Instead, both organizations and researchers must consider the pressure the social context of the workplace exerts on workers to engage in unhealthy, unproductive presenteeism behaviors.”
The solution, Smith says, mostly falls to employers, who should strive to develop better guidelines for “flexible, personalized policies and [support systems] that empower employees to make effective attendance decisions for themselves.”