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For anyone weighing the health of UK plc, a falling sickness-absence rate reads as good news: fewer lost days, steadier output, a workforce showing up. New data on how people actually work suggests the improvement is partly an illusion, and one with real consequences for earnings quality.
The signal is presenteeism, employees who stay logged on while ill rather than take a sick day. It almost never appears on a balance sheet, yet it quietly erodes the productivity and reliability that the market prices into a company.
What the data shows
According to a Censuswide survey of 4,000 remote workers across the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain, only 7.8% take a proper sick day and switch off completely when unwell. Some 47.8% now work through illness more often than they used to, and in the UK that figure rises to 51.4%. The survey was commissioned by iGaming.com, a company that runs entirely on a distributed workforce and so has a direct stake in how remote teams behave when they fall ill.
The national figures point the same way. The latest ONS data still records roughly 4.4 working days lost to sickness per worker and a sickness absence rate near 2%. People are not getting ill less often. They are increasingly logging the hours anyway, which moves the lost output off the absence statistics and into the quality of the work itself. The CIPD has long argued that working while unwell costs employers more than absence does, precisely because the work still gets done, just slowly and with more errors.
Why this matters for earnings quality
Absence is counted. Presenteeism is not. For an analyst, that asymmetry is the problem. A headline improvement in attendance can mask a deterioration in the output behind it, and that gap does not show up cleanly in any single line of a results statement. It surfaces instead as slower delivery, higher error rates and weaker service, the soft costs that grind at margins over several reporting periods rather than one.
The read-through is not uniform across sectors. In regulated financial services, an employee working through illness is not merely slower; they may be approving transactions, advising clients or running compliance checks, which turns presenteeism into an operational and conduct risk as much as a productivity one. In retail or hospitality the same problem tends to surface as errors, mis-priced stock and lost sales. In each case the cost lands somewhere other than the absence line, which is exactly why it is so easily missed by anyone reading only the top-line numbers.
The structural driver to watch
There is a clear driver in the data. Workers in countries with more generous sick pay were the least likely to work through illness, while UK workers, on Statutory Sick Pay of around £118 a week during the survey, were among the most likely. A third of remote workers, 33.8%, also believe that being less visible to managers has already cost them a promotion, which layers career anxiety on top of the financial pressure to stay online. Cheap statutory cover does not remove the cost of illness. It transfers it from recorded absence into unmeasured underperformance, which is the harder version for a market to detect.
The macro backdrop sharpens the point. Kalkine Media has reported on a declining UK private-sector employment picture amid rising costs and on rising unemployment alongside wage growth. In a labour market under that much strain, employers leaning on presenteeism to paper over the gaps may be deferring a productivity cost rather than avoiding it.
The takeaway for investors
None of this is a comment on any individual company or security. It is a workforce signal that cuts across the market. The practical lesson for anyone reading UK labour and productivity data is that a falling absence rate is not automatically bullish. It can be the sound of a workforce quietly working while ill, paying for it in output that never gets measured, and in earnings quality that looks steadier than it really is.
The content has been authored in collaboration with our guest contributor, John Cunningham.
