Absenteeism shows up on a roster. Presenteeism doesn’t show up anywhere, which is exactly why it costs organisations more.
It’s the employee who’s at their desk every day, logged in, technically present, but working at a fraction of their usual output. Tasks that used to take an hour take three. Small errors creep into work that used to be reliable. They’re sitting in the meeting, but not really engaging with it. Nothing about their attendance record would ever flag a problem, which is precisely what makes presenteeism a harder, and often more expensive, issue than people being away.
Why this is a productivity question, not just a wellbeing one
For HR teams and executives, the business case for taking this seriously isn’t really about empathy, though that matters too. It’s about output.
SafeWork NSW research puts the average cost of presenteeism at around $1,680 per employee per year, more than double the estimated cost of absenteeism at $825. At a national level, a landmark Medibank-commissioned study estimated workplace stress costs the Australian economy $14.81 billion a year, with presenteeism responsible for $9.69 billion of that, against $5.12 billion from absenteeism. Whichever figure you look at, the pattern holds: people struggling but still turning up tends to cost more than people staying home.
That’s not an argument for pushing unwell employees to take more leave. It’s a reminder that “they’re still getting the work done” isn’t a reliable signal that everything is fine.
Why presenteeism is so easy to miss
Absenteeism has a built-in alert system. It gets logged in a roster or leave system, flagged against an attendance record, and a manager notices a team member is away . Presenteeism has no equivalent trigger. The person is there, so the default assumption is that they’re coping.
This is part of why it tends to run for longer before anyone intervenes. A team member can operate below their usual capacity for months, quietly, before it’s named as a problem, let alone addressed. By the time it does surface, it’s often framed as a performance issue rather than what it frequently is: someone managing ongoing stress, fatigue, or personal pressure without the support to do it well.
What it actually looks like day to day
Presenteeism rarely announces itself. More often it shows up as a pattern leaders can learn to notice:
- A capable employee needing more reminders or check-ins than they used to
- Work quality dipping on routine tasks, not just complex ones
- Someone present in meetings but visibly disengaged or slower to contribute
- Small, uncharacteristic errors appearing in otherwise reliable work
- A general sense that someone is “going through the motions”
None of these are diagnostic on their own. People have off weeks. The point isn’t to monitor employees more closely looking for signs of struggle. It’s to recognise that sustained, unexplained dips in how someone’s working are worth a genuine check-in, not just a performance conversation.
What leaders and HR teams can actually do
The most useful shift is treating this as something to catch early, not manage after it’s already affected performance reviews.
Build capacity checks into regular conversations, not just annual reviews. A simple “how’s your workload actually feeling” in a normal one-on-one surfaces more than most formal processes do.
Equip managers to open the conversation well. Most managers aren’t clinicians and shouldn’t try to be, but noticing a change and asking a genuine, non-judgemental question is a skill that can be taught and practised.
Make support visible before someone’s struggling publicly. If employees only hear about the EAP during an onboarding session they’ve long forgotten, it won’t be front of mind when they need it.
Treat small, early conversations as normal, not a sign something’s seriously wrong. The earlier someone gets support, the less likely presenteeism has time to take hold.
If your organisation wants to build this kind of early-intervention habit into how your managers operate, Leapwell’s Manager Assist service gives leaders practical, confidential guidance on exactly these conversations, alongside direct access to counselling support for employees through Leapwell’s EAP. Catching this early tends to be far less costly, for people and for the business, than addressing it once it’s already shown up in performance numbers.