Absenteeism

How is absenteeism measured?

Two standard forms: unplanned absence days per employee per year (a common Australian planning figure is around nine), and the lost time rate, absence days as a percentage of scheduled working days, using 261 working days as the annual base. Measure unplanned absence separately from planned leave; annual leave taken as intended is a feature, not a cost.

What does absenteeism actually cost?

Direct cost first: a day's absence costs roughly the daily salary in lost output, before cover and overtime are added. At 100 employees averaging nine unplanned days, that is 900 lost days a year, several full-time equivalents of capacity. The indirect costs (disrupted teams, missed deadlines, supervisor time spent re-rostering) usually exceed the direct ones but never appear on a report.

Reading absence as a signal

Absence is behaviour, and behaviour has causes. Clusters under one manager, spikes after restructures and Monday/Friday patterns are not random; they are engagement, workload and psychosocial-hazard information arriving through the payroll system. Treat rising absence as a symptom to investigate, not a discipline problem to suppress, because suppressing it usually converts absence into presenteeism, which costs more.