» Back to listing Absence falls but presenteeism and stress are on the rise

Employee absence levels are on the slide in both the private and public sectors, but the falls could be masking deeper health problems in the workplace.

The headline finding from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s (CIPD) latest annual absence management survey,shows that employees took an average of 6.8 days off in the last 12 months compared with 7.7 days in the previous year.

The fall in absence levels coincides with almost a third of employees reporting an increase in the number of people going into work when ill. The threat of redundancies is shown to contribute to the rise in presenteeism, with organisations that are expecting to make job cuts in the next six months more likely to report an increase in employees going into work when unwell.

The public sector has seen the sharpest fall in absence levels, with an annual average of 7.9 days for every employee the lowest level in a decade; workers in the private sector take an average of 5.7 days off work every year.

Organisations that noted a rise in presenteeism over the past year are also more likely to report an increase in stress-related absence over the same period (52 per cent, compared with 38 per cent of those that did not report an increase in people coming in to work ill). Similarly, businesses with rising presenteeism are more likely to report an increase in mental-health problems, such as anxiety and depression (62 per cent, compared with 35 per cent of those who did not report an increase in people coming into work ill).

Overall, stress-related absence is on the increase, with two-fifths of employers recording a rise over the past year, and just one in ten reporting that the problem had subsided. For the second year running, the survey shows that stress is the most common cause of long-term absence, while more than double the number of employers reported an increase in mental-health problems in 2012 (44 per cent) compared with three years ago (21 per cent).

The proportion of organisations with an employee well-being strategy continues to rise, with 55 per cent of respondents saying they had one in place, compared with 46 per cent in both 2011 and 2010, and 33 per cent in 2009.