Wharton Prof Measures Cost of Employee Absences

Wharton Professor of health care systems Mark Pauly has led a team that measured the financial consequences of employee absences for individuals in thirty-five different job classifications across twelve different industries. Distilling the learning from 800 different interviews, the team was able to establish “multipliers” of workers wages, that described the financial impact of a day’s absence as a proportion of the worker’s daily wage or salary. The multipliers ranged from below 1.1 for waiters and non-residential construction workers, to greater than 1.5 for motor vehicle salespeople and mechanical engineers. Pauly believes this work gives companies the ability to more accurately measure the payoff that comes from improving the health of their employees.