Absences

Absences refer to the workdays on which employees are unavailable due to illness. Unlike turnover costs, they are well documented—a certificate of incapacity for work is available for each instance. What is missing in most companies is the calculation of these days into a monetary amount.

The Cost of a Day Absent from Work

The standard calculation uses ongoing personnel costs: the average annual salary plus the employer's non-wage labor costs, divided by the number of working days in a year.

With an annual salary of 48,000 euros, 20 percent in non-wage labor costs, and 220 working days, this amounts to approximately 262 euros per day of absence. This part is undisputed: During the period of continued pay, the salary continues to accrue, and with it the employer’s social security contributions—regardless of whether the work is made up, spread out, or left undone.

The failure rate

In addition to the amount in euros, the absenteeism rate is the more meaningful metric: the percentage of workdays on which paid working hours are not available. With 15 days of absence and 220 workdays, that amounts to about 6.8 percent.

The advantage of this metric is that it is independent of a company's size, making it suitable both for tracking a company's own development over several years and for comparing it with industry benchmarks.

What's Missing from the Bill

• Temporary Staffing: Overtime Pay, Temporary Work, Short-Term Temporary Staff
• Productivity loss in the team that covers for the absence
• Delays and Their Consequences, Including Contractual Penalties
• Quality Costs Associated with Training Substitutes
• Reintegration After a Prolonged Illness

The amount calculated based on personnel costs is therefore a lower bound, not a full-cost calculation. Anyone who presents it as the total cost is underestimating it.

There is a difference between short-term and long-term

A single sick day results in different follow-on costs than a six-week absence. Short absences primarily disrupt daily scheduling; long absences lead to the need for substitutes, project delays, and a measurable loss of knowledge during the employee’s absence.

For management, this breakdown is therefore more revealing than the average: Ten employees with fifteen days of absence each result in the same rate as two employees on long-term sick leave and eight with hardly any absences—yet the consequences are completely different.

A Comparison with Industry Benchmarks

Industry averages are useful for context, but they are only reliable when the source is cited. Surveys differ in terms of which types of absences they count—sick leave, rehabilitation, caring for a sick child, workplace accidents—and the population to which they refer. A comparative figure without a cited publication, date, and scope is of little value.

What can be inferred from this — and what cannot

The calculation quantifies a burden. It says nothing about what portion of that burden can be influenced. Some of the days lost cannot be influenced: waves of infection, accidents, and chronic illnesses.

That is why this figure is useful as a benchmark, not as a target: it indicates the order of magnitude within which a measure must fall in order to be financially viable at all. It does not answer the question of whether—or to what extent—a specific measure is effective.

Conclusion

Absenteeism is one of the few HR metrics that can be measured without estimates—the number of days is already known. Converting the figure to euros is simple, but interpreting it is not: The calculated amount is a lower bound; the rate alone masks the distribution between short-term and long-term absences; and the portion that can be influenced is smaller than the total.