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Workplace Wellness Lab delivers leading insights, ideas and information on wellness, health management, and healthy living.

Our goal is simple: Workplace Wellness Lab provides regular and better information as an important path to create healthy individual outcomes, while helping change health care in America.

By connecting the audiences that matter – consultants, corporate executives, policymakers, thought leaders, journalists, customers, and more – we establish a positive, substantive, and influential voice within the wellness industry that makes the case that:

    • Left unchecked, current trends in health spend and outcomes are unsustainable.
    • Given that half the healthcare dollars in this country are incurred by employers, well-executed preventive care health management programs in the worksite are clearly enduring and valuable, helping drive improved workplace environments and individual outcomes.
    • Industry coherence around private sector innovation to drive effective health management programs is economically vital, given what’s possible in a spend category that is arguably one of the greatest challenges in America today.

Workplace Wellness Lab comes at this challenge principally from the employer point of view: What are the credible and demonstrated best practices in preventive care to structure programs that have an enduring impact? How can the impact be made explicit, as something that is both the right thing to do and a proactive business initiative that lowers the cost of care, as experienced by both employers and employees?

And Workplace Wellness Lab goes beyond the workplace. It’s a robust platform filled with ideas and insights from those that influence how employers think about this opportunity: research organizations, non-profits, think tanks and more.

From an editorial point of view, great ideas can come from anywhere. With that philosophy in mind, we will combine our own original content with other content across the web. We organize the content, with a view to making it as simple and useful as possible.

All content will be sourced. If we found it somewhere, we’ll tell you where we got — and how to get to that site yourself.

We also welcome your comments — criticisms, ideas, and, yes, we take compliments, too! Have a thought of what you’d like to see — or see something you think others should know — drop us a line.

Thanks for visiting – and please come back again!

Transparency is extremely important to us, so we are letting you know that we may receive a commission on some of links you click on from this page. See our disclaimer.

One business cost that well-run workplace wellness programs seek to address is absenteeism — when employees miss work because of illness or related reasons. But another major cost to business is when employees are not feeling physically or mentally well, but show up to work anyhow: Presenteeism.

This can reduce productivity and potentially expose colleagues to their illness (in some cases of physical illness, such as the flu) as well.

We've reported on the costs of presenteeism:

  • The firm Wildgoose conducted a survey of employees from 250 companies across the UK and wrote: “It is imperative that employers address the issue of mental health symptoms within the workplace, particularly as it is estimated that the average cost to a business per employee as a result of absence due to mental health symptoms totals £1,035 per year.”
  • A study published in BMC Public Health titled “Healthy and productive workers: using intervention mapping to design a workplace health promotion and wellness program to improve presenteeism” states: “The economic costs related to presenteeism exceed those of absenteeism and employer health costs. Employers are implementing workplace health promotion and wellness programs to improve health among workers and reduce presenteeism.”

Now a Workplace Insight report indicates just how significant the presenteeism problem may be: “Two-thirds (64 percent) of employees have gone to work despite being unwell over the last 12 months, claims a new survey which found that a quarter (26 percent) of people worried that their absence will be a burden on their team.”

Additional Insights on Presenteeism

The post is based on research from Bupa. Additional insights:

  • “More than one in four (27 percent) employees ignore their doctor’s orders to stay at home and ‘soldier on’.”
  • “A third of employees would go to work despite back pain or issues related to their joints.”
  • “A similar number (29 percent) head to work when suffering from mental health issues such as depression.”

The post explains the problem — and potential business impact — clearly: “High levels of ‘presenteeism’ are in fact associated with loss of productivity and reduced performance – as employees who push themselves into work when unwell, risk delaying their own recovery.”

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