Every second employee in Germany often goes to work sick, many find sitting in front of a screen stressful and the majority regularly work overtime. These are the central results of a study presented by the Techniker Krankenkasse (TK). Another finding: four out of ten employees receive little or no feedback from their managers about their performance. The TK board chairman Jens Baas spoke of a “disconcerting result” with a view to the high proportion of employees appearing sick in the office or factory hall.
Together with the Institute for Company Health Consulting (IFBG) in Konstanz, TK surveyed more than 11,000 employees from 43 companies and public institutions between 2018 and 2021. It confirms what many employees know from their day-to-day work: colleagues go to work despite the flu, inflammation or other ailments. Women in particular showed this behavior, which is called “presenterism” in the technical jargon, namely 56 percent, while 47 percent stated this as a common pattern for men. According to the study, a third of them go to work despite having severe symptoms.
This not only has consequences for employees because they spread diseases, explained health insurance manager Baas, but also for the company because colleagues would be infected and more mistakes would occur. Even the express medical advice to stay at home cannot prevent the majority of the sick from what they apparently see as their professional duty. Almost a third of the respondents work anyway: 7.5 percent even “often” or “very often”, 10.5 percent “sometimes”, 13.5 percent “rarely”.
The corona pandemic has brought some improvement here, says the IFBG study director, Utz Niklas Walter. There is a tendency to work sick less often during the Corona period, but the employees also eat less and move less – apparently a consequence of the widespread home office, which makes it unnecessary to leave your own apartment.
TK boss Baas put the overzealousness of the sick in connection with their workload. Those who work a lot of overtime or generally have too little time for their work at work are also more likely to go to work sick. Despite – or because of the Corona crisis and the widespread short-time work – overtime by employees is still an issue. Around a third of those surveyed often or always work overtime.
The respondents found long periods of time in front of the screen (56 percent), the posture they had to adopt while working (48 percent) and the room temperature (19 percent) to be particularly stressful. You could possibly address such annoyances in a detailed conversation with your manager, but that’s another problem: Four out of ten respondents said the boss never or rarely spoke to them about the quality of their work, only one in four came often or constantly talking about it.