Why organisations won’t talk about absence and why that needs to change.
There is a curious reluctance in UK boardrooms right now.
Leaders across the public and private sector are frustrated. Costs are rising. Productivity is flat. Growth feels out of reach. Every conversation we have, whether with an NHS Trust or a large corporate, eventually comes back to the same pressures.
And yet the same organisations will not discuss absence.
This is worth examining. Absence is not a fixed cost. It is not an act of God. It is one of the few levers available to a large employer that, when pulled properly, simultaneously reduces costs, improves productivity, and drives growth. Done properly, it comes close to being a magic sauce.
So what explains the silence?
In our experience, there are three reasons organisations avoid the conversation.
The first is accountability. Acknowledging that absence is a problem means acknowledging that the numbers reported to the board for years may have been wrong, incomplete, or simply not acted upon.
The second is management performance. Genuinely tackling absence requires confronting whether managers are following policy and process consistently. Most organisations are not comfortable with the answer.
The third is inertia. It is easier to commission another wellbeing initiative or defer the conversation to the next planning cycle than to build the data-driven case for change.
The organisations we work with who are making real progress share one characteristic. They are not doing anything especially complicated. They have simply decided to have an honest conversation about what the data actually shows and then act on it.
The opportunity cost of continued avoidance is significant. There is no single better, lower-cost route to improved productivity available to a large employer in the current environment.
The question is not whether absence is worth addressing. It is why so many organisations are still finding reasons not to.
