Investors scrutinise a company’s margins, order book and balance sheet. The health of its workforce rarely gets the same attention, partly because the usual metric, sickness absence, is easy to misread. New research suggests a falling absence rate can hide a workforce quietly working itself into the ground.
A Censuswide survey of 4,000 remote workers across the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain, commissioned by the remote-first company iGaming.com, found that only 7.8% take a proper sick day and fully switch off when ill, while 47.8% now work through illness more than they used to. For anyone weighing the companies they hold, the gap between recorded absence and actual illness is worth understanding.
Absence down does not mean healthy
A lower absence rate looks like a well-run, healthy workforce. It can be the opposite. The CIPD has long argued that presenteeism costs employers more than absence does, through slower work, errors that need correcting and illnesses that drag on. The ONS still records a sickness absence rate near 2% and around 4.4 days lost per worker, so illness has not fallen. It has simply stopped being logged. This research on workforce health and presenteeism puts numbers to how widely that is now happening.
What it signals about a company
For a stock-picker, presenteeism is a workforce-quality signal. A business that runs on people logging in sick from bed, leans heavily on monitoring (46.1% of remote workers say they are watched in some way), and offers thin sick pay is carrying under-reported risk: productivity drag, higher error rates and the kind of slow burnout that eventually surfaces as turnover and recruitment cost. A third of workers, 33.8%, already believe that being less visible to managers has cost them a promotion, which feeds attrition risk. None of this lands cleanly in headline absence numbers, yet it sits squarely in the “S” of ESG and in long-run productivity. For investors using a human-capital or social lens, that makes presenteeism a concrete input rather than a soft one, mapping onto the workforce-wellbeing, turnover and productivity measures that increasingly feature in company disclosures.
A natural experiment in what drives it
The survey doubles as a natural experiment. Workers in countries with generous statutory sick pay were the least likely to work through illness; those with the least generous cover were the most likely. German employees, on six weeks of full pay, came in lowest at 42.1%, against 51.4% in the UK. The read-through for investors is that workforce behaviour is shaped by structural incentives a company can actually influence, through its own sick-pay and leave policies, not by culture alone. Firms that under-invest there may be quietly importing risk that surfaces later as churn and lost output.
How to read it across a portfolio
Investors cannot survey a workforce directly, but the signals are gettable: employee-sentiment platforms, disclosed staff turnover, sickness and wellbeing policies, and how a company talks about flexible working in its reporting. It also pays to watch how a company frames its absence numbers. A management team that boasts about record-low sick days without mentioning workload, monitoring or wellbeing may be celebrating the wrong thing, because the same falling number can describe a healthier workforce or a more frightened one. UK Investor Magazine has tracked a softening UK jobs market and continued labour-market deterioration; in a looser market, firms may lean harder on presenteeism, deferring a cost rather than removing it. Positioning a portfolio for today’s UK market increasingly means asking whether the companies in it are sweating their people in ways that will not hold.
None of this is a recommendation to buy or sell any security; it is a lens for reading workforce quality. But the next time a company reports falling absence as a win, it is worth asking the harder question: are its people healthier, or just better at hiding that they are not?