Presenteeism and sickness absence among office and factory workers in a food industry

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Presenteeism and sickness absence among office
and factory workers in a food industry

• .
• Kimmo Vänni MSc1 Pekka VirtanenMD PhD3
  Tiina Luukkaala MSc 2 Clas-Håkan Nygård PhD
• 1 TAMK University of Applied Sciences Tampere
  Finland
• 2 Science Center Pirkanmaa Hospital District and
  Tampere School of Public Health University of
  Tampere Tampere Finland
• 3 Tampere School of Public Health University of
  Tampere Tampere Finland
•  

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Introduction

• Presenteeism means by a broad definition
  presence at the workplace of employees who are
  not fully working.
• A major part of presenteeism is attributable to
  symptoms illnesses diseases or injuries that
  occur among the employees
• Sickness presence may be as significant as
  sickness absence both from the viewpoint of
  health and well-being of the employees as from
  the viewpoint of economy
• Basic statistics like trends absolute figures
  are scarce

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Study lines of presenteeism

• connection between medical conditions and
  presenteeism
• health risks as risks of presenteeism
• human resource management and economic impacts of
  presenteeism

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Categories of health related productivity loss

• 1) Temporary sickness absence
• 2) Temporary sickness presence
• 3) Permanent sickness absence i.e. disability
  retirement
• 4) Permanent sickness presence of employees with
  chronic disabling diseases

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• In industry blue collar has higher numbers (
  6.7) than than white collar employees (4.4)
• Younger employees has more short spells (1-3
  days) of sickness absence and older more long
  spells (gt3 days)
• Food industry factory workers has high sickness
  absence rates (76 19 days/year/person)
  compared to industry in all (6.2) (EK 2005)
• Corresponding figures about presenteeism are
  almost unknown

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Aim

• To quantify the amount of presenteeism among
  female and male factory and office workers in
  different ages
• (i.e. quantify the degree of permanent lowered
  work ability and associated productivity loss and
  relate it to loss due to sickness absence)

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Materials and methods

• The study was carried out at one of the largest
  food processing companies in Finland consisting
  of an administration center and four factories.
  The company employed in all 1995 persons at the
  time for the study.

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Register data

• Data on age gender task (salary or hourly
  wages) and sickness absences of all individual
  employed from January 1to December 31 2003 were
  received from the register of the personnel
  department
• We calculated that a person without any absence
  from work had 228 working days annually

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Survey data

• Delivered to all employees of the company
• 1120 replies (response rate 56)
• 873 (78) gave permission to combine the survey
  data with their sickness absence records
• after exclusion of incomplete replies the number
  of respondents of eligible for this study was 847

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Perceived health and work ability

• Define your current work ability compared with
  the lifetime best (scale 0-10)
• What is your current general health (0-10)

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Productivity loss

• calculations based on earlier studies Work
  Limited Questionnaire and Work Productivity Short
  Inventory for estimating productivity losses
  (Ozminkowski et al 2004)
• total productivity losses were usually associated
  with perceived health status and the existence of
  particular medical conditions irrespective of
  demographics or job type
• the result of their study was that average
  productivity loss due to presenteeism was 4.9
  (WLQ instrument) or 6.9 (WPSI instrument)

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Calculating presenteeism
49 69
Increasing productivity loss
84
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Sickness absence and presenteeism
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Sickness presenteeism and sickness absence by
age days
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Sickness presenteeism and sickness absence by
age
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Discussion

• this study showed in line with earlier research
  higher presenteeism and sickness absence figures
  among factory workers than among office workers
• higher sickness absence in female than male
  factory workers but no differences in
  presenteeism
• the total loss of productivity was lowest among
  female office workers and highest among female
  factory workers
• presenteeism slightly increased by increasing age
• the findings from earlier research about higher
  rates of presenteeism than sickness absence in
  the total loss were confirmed in our study in
  case of the office workers while in the case of
  factory workers sickness absence dominated as a
  reason for productivity loss at the company
  level.

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