The impact of employee well-being policies and sickness absence on workplace performance

This chapter brings new evidence on the relationship between employees' well-being, sickness absence, and four dimensions of workplace performance: productivity, efficiency, quality of service, and profitability. It uses a new panel data set with monthly observations over two years for 48 local units of a large multisite organization in the logistics sector. It finds that good consultation and communication at the local level are associated with lower absenteeism. It also finds that lower absence is associated with higher efficiency, productivity, quality of the service, and profitability of the firm. Finally, the authors suggest that the link between workers' absence and this firm's profitability runs through the increased use of replacement labor, which raises short-run costs and reduces quality of service.