#TBT: Bob Costas, Presenteeism and Its Impact on Productivity

As part of our “Throwback Thursday” blog series, we’re taking a look at a research topic that’s currently in the news and tagging it with previous research, videos or commentaries in a relevant way. As the saying goes, “what’s old is new again” – and we hope you enjoy our wonky twist on #tbt.

NBC sportscaster Bob Costas made headlines this week not only because of his coverage of the Olympics, but because he continued to work despite an eye infection. As the Washington Post pointed out in a blog post Wednesday, Costas made the right decision by staying home from work.

Going to work while sick, like Costas, is known as “presenteeism,” a term used to describe employees with health conditions who are at work but unable to perform at full capacity. Health-related presenteeism has a larger impact on lost productivity than absenteeism, according to peer-reviewed research sponsored by the National Pharmaceutical Council (NPC) and published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in 2009.

“People turning up to work sick is actually a vexing problem for employers that could, by some estimates, cost them as much as $150 billion a year,” Post reporter Sarah Kliff wrote. “There's no standard for measuring how much productivity, exactly, is lost to sick workers on the job, but a number of studies have ballparked it to be between 20 and 60 percent of a given company's health-care costs, according to the Harvard Business Review.”

So how can employers attempt to mitigate presenteeism and the productivity loss associated with it? “Employers need to move beyond solutions that focus only on specific medical conditions and toward the development of integrated personal health support strategies that deal with multiple health conditions and health risks by focusing on the whole person as well as the whole population,” said Thomas Parry, PhD, president of the Integrated Benefits Institute and an author of the NPC-sponsored research.

According to the research, “Health and Productivity as a Business Strategy: A Multiemployer Study,” employers who focus only on medical and pharmacy costs in creating employee health strategies may misidentify the health conditions that most impact the productivity of their employees – while underestimating the impact of other factors. In particular, health conditions with the greatest impact on employee productivity are often not the conditions with the highest medical and pharmacy costs. When productivity loss is included, the five most costly conditions are depression, obesity, arthritis, back/neck pain and anxiety. When employers focus on medical and pharmacy costs alone they may miss an opportunity to address these potentially much more impactful conditions.

To learn more about the research and presenteeism, be sure to check out the research on NPC’s website, along with a video featuring the study’s authors. In the meantime, we wish Bob Costas a speedy recovery.