Calculating the real cost of Absenteeism: Audit Workshop part 4

Episode 4: Calculating the real cost of Absenteeism - Audit workshop part 4.

10% of your team absent for 4 hours a day?

That single habit could be quietly costing your business tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds every year.

In this episode, we get practical.

You'll discover exactly how to calculate the real financial impact of unathorised absenteeism.

The late starts, early finishes, extended breaks, and daily distractions, using simple, real-world maths you can apply to your own organisation straight away.

Drawing on Gallup's workplace research and Deloitte's lost-productivity data, we breakdown a clear 100-employee example and show you how to turn raw timesheet data into hard numbers: Daily costs, annual losses, and why this visible drain often represents 5-8% of your total people costs.

You'll leave with a quick, actionable exercise: Calculate your own rough daily and annual absenteeism cost in under 20 minutes, and identify whether it's already a red flag in your team.

If you've ever wondered why your payroll feels heavy but output feels light, then this episode gives you the keys to the missing piece.

Listen now and start plugging one of the most visible leaks in your business.

Our next episode we are unlocking the strategies to assist employees with arthritis in our illness is not a burden series - Subscribe so you don't miss it!

For a full diagnostic CEDAR report or our full workshop of the audit and more, contact us and mention this podcast for a special listener offer.

Links:

Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2026 report - State of the Global Workplace | 2026 Global Data Summary - Gallup

Deloitte UK Mental Health Report (£51bn) - Poor mental health costs UK employers £51 billion a year for employees | Deloitte UK

#absenteeism #workplaceproductivity #HRMetrics #wellbeingroi #employeeabsence #businesscosts #UKbusiness2026

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Hello everybody and welcome to the Chronic Edge Unleashed, where we stop pretending chronic illness with neurodivergence and high performance careers cannot coexist. I'm ALT Evans, and this is Behind the Edge. So welcome back to this uh late night edition uh for me filming that is of Behind the Edge, back with the audit, hidden costs, real gains, well-being, return on investment, uncovered.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Part four, absentism. The visible drain, you can see.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

If you look hard enough, you can see. So we're gonna be uh now if you've listened to the start of our series on the workplace, you'll already have your people cost baseline. You'll know about all the key benchmarks and all of the other little bits that we taught. And this is the one that you're gonna need your pen and paper for. I would usually do some visuals with this one, and um, I'm if you're doing the video, I would probably do more visuals in it. But if it's not in the video, you know, on audio, do tend to get your pen and paper to maybe do some of your diagrams or if you do pie charts and other things like that. Other than that, I will go through verbally what you should be seeing. So, as we say in today's episode, we're going to be focusing on the most visual, visible, sorry, and measurable drains in any organization, and that is absenteism. And tempest, this is where 10% of your team absent for four hours a day could be costing you tens of thousands of pounds every day. And this is exactly how we're gonna count it.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

So let's get to the numbers.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Now, before we start, let's clarify a few terms before we get in before we properly get into the calculations. Quick and important clarification in that is absenteeism is the time employees are away from their desks, their workload without any reason. Such as arriving late, leaving early, longer breaks, or general distractions during the working day. This is the visible portion that shows up on timesheets and payroll. And it is very distinctive from presenteism, which is physically being at work but operating at a reduced capacity due to ill health or stress, which we will cover later in the series. But today we're gonna be focusing on the measurable, visible drain you can see and calculate right now. So let's get to the breakdown. These are real-world-based calculations. We're gonna use Gallups, so G-A-L-L-U-P, and we will obviously put the link in there as well. Workplace research consistently shows that disengaged employees lose significant productive time each day through unauthorized absence and distractions. Now, studies indicate that in many organizations, around 10% of their staff will lose up to four hours per day, where the majority of staff lose between one and one and a half hours per day on average. So if we used a straightforward calculation of a hundred employees, this is where you can plug in your own numbers. So whatever number I'm gonna use a hundred because it's easy reckoning. You you work out how many employees you've got, you put that number in, and that's how we're gonna do some of the calculations. Now let's do some assumptions. We're not sat here with all your details. Now, if we were doing our own audit version, I would be sat here with your numbers and we'd go through your numbers, but we aren't, so we're just going to make them up. So let's assume on average the working day is seven and a half hours, and your company-wide average hourly wage is £25. Now, this is when you're looking at the UK median salary of about £39,039. But we're going to simply replace this with your actually hourly rate. Now, if we remember from the first couple of WordPress, we talked about working out the average salary. So you're just working that out for the hourly rate, and that's not going to work with it. So we're going to use £25 on this one. 100 employees £25. So we're going to do the maths. Now, obviously, I've written this down because I have this calcular, and if I try to do it my hand head, just no chance. So I've already got these written down before. So we're going to use your 10 high absence employees. That is your 10 people times the four hours times the 25 pounds will equal 1,000 pounds per day. You would obviously put in your number of people with 4 hours, your average salary per hour, and that will be cover your figure. So we're going to use a thousand pounds per day.

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Per year. Now let's look at the 90 remaining staff.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Always lose an average between 1.4 hours as an average. Well, you can use 1.2, whatever you want, but I'm going to use 1.4. Now you could use a weighting process on this. Sometimes we do, because not everybody has dissatisfaction. You will have some to do it, but we would like to put it on an average. Usually a weighting process would be effective about 25%-ish. But when we look at dissatisfaction, we've talked about it. 90% are people are unhappy for one reason or another, and that leads into these absenteeism figures. So let's just keep it as the average. So your 90 people, or whatever your people are left after your 10% has come out, times 1.4 hours times the £25 equals £3150 per day.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Now I'm going to repeat that per day.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

Now over the year combined with your number of 100 employees, losing between the four hours and the 1.4, over the year is £787,000 five.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

So let me repeat that figure.

SPEAKER_01 7:33

So you're looking at your total daily absenteeism figure cost of £4,150 per day of a loss.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

And an annual absenteeism cost of just over a million pounds.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Based on a hundred people. Now if you're a company with five thousand, ten thousand employees, well, first of all, congratulations. But then you're working out how much that could be. Obviously, if you've only got about ten staff, that's gonna be a hell of a lot of a lower figure, but it's still a big figure. When you work it all out, this is money that you are paying for work that is simply not getting done.

SPEAKER_00 8:20

And it appears directly on payroll. You can see it. Now let's look at the bigger picture.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

I'm gonna look at Delotti and Gallup again. They're insight. Now Deloty's mental health research shows that lost productivity time, which includes visible absenteeism, forms a substantial part of the five hundred sorry of the fifty-one billion annual cost to UK employees. Gallup's research further highlights that low engagement drives significantly higher rates of this daily time loss, where disengaged employees are absent or distracted two to three times more often than engaged ones. And when you look at the overall cost breakdown in most organizations, absenteeism alone can count for between five and eight percent of total people related expenditure. So if we take a business with an average turnover of around five million pounds, that can easily be translated into a quarter of a million to four hundred thousand pounds in pure lost input or output, shall we say. Again, five million pound turnover is a loss of up to four hundred thousand pounds in pure lost output. It's not physical money running out of there, but it's potential money. It's money that you're paying for in wages for work that is not being done. And it all leads back to that dissatisfaction and other issues and other things that they could all be resolved. You can easily get some of this money back. So let's look at some actionable goals because that's what you hear from. You want to learn, but you also want to learn how to potentially resolve these things. So let's look at the immediate takeaway. Now, using your approximate numbers from your own organization, take your total headcount, estimate or pull from your records how many people are typically losing between three to four hours a day versus the 1.5, so 10%. Multiply the number of people times lost hours per day by your average hourly rate, do the rough calculation, then multiply it by 250 working days for your annual figure. Preferably sat down when you do these calculations, because as we've just done on the example, they're scary.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

Now ask yourself Is this number a red flag for my team? Now if it's running into the thousands of pounds a month, it certainly is.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Now write down the figure and note one team or department where you suspect that the problem is worse. Now when you break this down into departmental, you will you'll start to get an idea of where m dissatisfaction is, maybe toxicity in the workplace, maybe lost talent, not engaging, you know, you can see where all your your areas are. Now keep this number going on, but we'll work on this number in the future as well.

SPEAKER_00 12:05

So now you know exactly how to measure one of the most visible drains on your business. And next time we're gonna look at sickness. Well, thank you very much. But I didn't need your assistance.

SPEAKER_01 12:29

But I'm not gonna refilm this episode because I don't. These things just happened. And I really should have turned her off beforehand. But she's not here to help me. I'm here to help you, and we're gonna carry on. And anybody that didn't hear it, you know what it the the your background sound effect went off and asked me a question, but uh we'll ignore that. So as we say, we're gonna look at the short and long term and how it compounds the cost that we've just calculated. Now, if you would like the Chronic Hedge to run the full um audit, CERA audit for you, you know, just head down to the comments, send them a message, say, look, you know, we'd love to have a look at this audit properly. Can you go through with us and we can do the full audit for you? And we can look at how to cost that up for you. That is not a problem. Um, if you want any full workshop of this, where I do the full workshop instead of broken down into these little ones, we can look at doing a day workshop with you or half a day, depending on what you're looking for. Do half a day in a uh self-image course as well, you know, for confidence from some of your staff as well. I do multiple different options in there, so there's lots of different opportunities in there. Now we we talk about a little bit about um how to help with those areas. Now we will talk about them a little bit more. This is more about the calculation side, how to calculate your audit. But a little bit of a freebie in here of how to um resolve that a little bit better is when you go back and have a look at maybe one or episode, and I'll tag it in here for um for anybody who's on video of which video to look at is dissatisfaction, is the killer. If you start working out why people are unhappy and why people are leaving, and why people are dissatisfied with the work, you can start to reduce those 10% down to your uh 90% people, whether it's like an hour or an hour and a half and things like that. Now, the plan is not to you know watch people like a hawk all the time because you you you just can't that and that's worse. And what it is is is some of that could be very simple uh longer breaks. And they're uh now these are unauthorized breaks, not authorized breaks, or you get your 15 minutes here then everywhere. That's why it's seven and a half hours, not eight hours. But these are the ones where they'll um you know they'll mm go on cigarette extra cigarette breaks that are unauthorized or will um take longer in different things, scroll and they've got no work. They've done all their work, they've got nothing else to do, you know, you've not got a additional program in there about training. I always remember the uh the thing, if you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean, you know, it's it's i if somebody's bored at work, that that's that's your fault, you know. It you have things in there to engage them to make them want to do more. You know, um so always they hear the thing about the water cooler. There's a great event called the water cooler for networking. That's where people gather around the water cooler and chat. Now we're not trying to say that people shouldn't be able to engage with teams and things like that. But these are a lot of where these figures are coming from. The four-hour people, the ones who turn up to work and I'm gonna do the job and and then they'll start talking to other people, and they'll go have extra breaks, they'll go out, and it and every time you you look in and things, they look as though they're very busy, but they're busy doing nothing. And sometimes a lot of times that can be because they're disengaged at work, you know, toxicity in the workplace, unhappy with multiple different things. And by looking at that dissatisfaction um video that we've discussed, there's ways in there of how you can reduce it. But for the audit, it's all about the numbers, it's not about blame, it's not about anything else, it's understanding the numbers to get a better return on your investment, which is your business. So I really appreciate you listening to this one. And as I say, the next one for the audit is going to be uh looking at sickness short and long term. Next week we were back to um arthritis in the workplace. We're gonna be looking at the strategies for the employee. Uh, then we'll talk a little bit about um something else behind the edge on one of our other subjects. And then we're gonna be back to illness is not a burden for the final inclusive workplace, and then we'll come back to the audit. And by then, by then, which should be coming into the end of June, we should have our community up and running. It should be really exciting. And I will do a proper video on that, and I will talk more about that, and I'll do a run-through for it and everything else. So I do appreciate you again talking to me and listening to me, and do share, like, subscribe, everything, all of those types of things. I really appreciate it. It would be really cool. And you've got to remember just to if you're an employee, employer, sorry, if you're an employer and you're listening to this, you know, take care of your people, really take care of them because they really are your edge.

SPEAKER_00 17:58

So I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Have a good day. Good night.