Your office space could be contributing to your absenteeism costs - WTTL Article

Your office space could be contributing to your absenteeism costs

MIKE CHRIST

People enjoy being in spaces that inspire them, stimulate them, and provide them opportunities to interact with other people.

You may have heard that most business leaders don’t recognize how the quality of their office space impacts their ability to attract and retain talented employees. This oversight is costly enough on its own, but there is also an expensive flip side.

Even if they do a better-than-average job with recruitment and retention, leaders rarely measure what absenteeism costs their companies. When research shows that simply improving the décor can reduce sick days, there seems to be no excuse for this oversight—and no understating how valuable dynamic office space can be to a company’s bottom line.

Sick days aren’t a given There is a pervading sense in today’s professional work culture that employees missing work is just part of the deal, a cost of doing business. Sure, everyone gets sick once in a while. Sometimes there are family emergencies. There is also growing evidence that taking the occasional mental health day can be beneficial to productivity while also enhancing workplace culture.

The bottom line: it’s not fair to expect everyone to show up to every workday of the year; but it’s also costly to overlook your company’s rate of absenteeism.

If your rate is high and you’re doing nothing to improve it, then you’re just letting money fly out the window.

Sick days are alarmingly expensive In the U.S., the annual rate of absenteeism is 3-4% per employee. At first glance, that number might not seem huge—it might even look like an acceptable cost of doing business—but if you extrapolate it out across your full employee base, the expense adds up in a hurry.

When an employee misses work, every cent you spend on their weighted average hourly pay is lost. Then, you have to consider the cost of benefits per hour. Add in the cost of lost productivity for co-workers and managers who have to pick up the slack. Multiply all of that to arrive at a sense of what you’re losing in quality, delivery time of the work product, and stress for the employees who are present at work.

Sick days are a productivity drag Absenteeism costs employers four things, and only two of them are obvious. First, the obvious ones: 1) the absent employee’s pay for the day, and 2) the absent employee’s productivity for the day. And the less obvious ones: 3) the productivity of every employee that the absent employee works with on any given day, and 4) the experience of every client/customer that the absent employee works with on any given day.

When someone misses work, it creates a drag on the work product of whole teams. When a key performer is missing, coworkers must pick up the slack, performing extra work to make up for the shortfall. Taking up the responsibilities of another employee doesn’t just slow everything down; it reduces the quality of the work product across the board.

On the customer side, absenteeism impacts relationships.

People prefer working with representatives they know; anytime that representative is missing, the customer must endure working with someone they don’t have a strong relationship with, someone who might not be able to answer all their questions or meet all their needs as fully as the absent employee, someone who—simply because he/she is having to do the job of more than one person—isn’t capable of delivering the highest-quality work product.

If that rate of absenteeism climbs high enough, you lose more than just productivity; you lose business.

An often-overlooked contributor to sick days: your office space How do you reduce the rate of absenteeism? There are many leadership and cultural changes you can make to help compel more of your people to show up for work more often, but few are as immediately impactful as improving your office space. Dynamic office space can help reduce sick leave by as much as 30%.

How is this possible? Simple: people enjoy being in spaces that inspire them, stimulate them, and provide them opportunities to interact with other people. If you are proud of the place you work and generally enjoy being there, then you are less likely to call in sick or take that mental health day. Why would you want to be at home rather than in an environment that makes you feel comfortable, happy, healthy, and fulfilled?

It’s one thing to stay home from an office you must compel yourself to go to on a regular basis. It’s quite another to stay home and sacrifice your chance to spend time in a dynamic, comfortable space — one with clean air and stimulating lighting and décor, where friends and co-workers are excited to see you, a place where you can enjoy a great lunch and a delicious cup of coffee in the cafeteria, and a place where you can drop off dry cleaning and get some exercise in the fitness center. For the former, you’re simply choosing to skip a day of work; for the latter, you’re choosing to skip a day of your life.

Make your office more than just an office; make it a place where your employees love to be. Do this and absenteeism will plummet, and your bottom line will soar.

This article is an excerpt from Work Them to Life: Upgrade Your Office Space to Win the Talent War authored by Jim Scalo and currently available for purchase on Amazon.