For years we have watched employees of various businesses invest emotionally in the organisations they work for. It seems logical doesn’t it? We spend approximately half of our ‘awake time’ at work and many of us throw our hearts and souls into what we do and more specifically, who we do it for. Emotional investment would appear to be a foregone conclusion much of the time.
Given our keen interest in all things ‘workforce analytics’, and appetite to challenge ‘conventional thinking’ we were fascinated to hear of research emerging from Radboud University (Nijmegen, Netherlands) linking emotional disengagement in the workplace to positive impacts on numerous people metrics.
A lack of emotional engagement with work is generally considered undesirable, however a Dutch study, conducted by Radboud University academic Roel Schouteten linking it with reduced absenteeism, suggests it could be a valuable coping mechanism.
The study used multiple work characteristics scales, the Work Ability Index, and a burnout scale to compare 242 university employees’ health and work-life balance with their absenteeism records.
The key results from the study showed:
- An unsurprising correlation between emotional exhaustion (burnout) and estimated work impairment due to disease, and future absenteeism.
- The better an employee’s prognosis of their work ability (a personal trait that reflects their ability to perform their job, meet work demands and apply health and mental resources) in the future, the less likely they were to be absent in the following year.
- The “burnout dimension of depersonalisation”, revealed that feeling distant from work implied a positive effect with employees who “sensed greater distance” from their work proving less likely to report frequent absenteeism.
- The research also found no evidence to suggest work characteristics (such as job demands and job resources) were a significant predictor of absence.
So, what can be gleaned from these study results? Firstly emotional distance might function not only as an indicator of burnout but also as a kind of coping mechanism, enabling people to cope with stressful working conditions. Secondly, keeping a distance may help prevent negative effects on employees, such as health problems or sickness absence. And finally, even if job demands and job resources relate to stress and burnout, they did not directly affect absenteeism in this study.
The study challenges previous research that suggests predictors of absenteeism frequency or duration are unique, because it shows both personal factors (measured by work ability) and work-related factors (measured by burnout) simultaneously predict absenteeism frequency.
Two main “managerial implications” can be drawn from the study.
In the first instance, when screening for absenteeism, employers should use a combination of work ability and burnout measures, because both instruments offer good predictors of absenteeism.
Secondly, efforts to prevent absenteeism and health problems should aim at improving the employee’s work ability, especially mental resources and vitality… Alternatively, these efforts might function to prevent the occurrence of burnout, in the form of emotional exhaustion, such as by decreasing the level of job demands.
It is important to note that that Schouteten’s research is not suggesting a general disengagement from the workplace is appropriate, merely that there appear to be several benefits in drawing a clear delineation between the professional and the personal.
Nick Kennedy
Managing Partner – deliberatedge
Source – Predicting absenteeism: screening for work ability or burnout, Roel Schouteten, Oxford Journal of Occupational Medicine, November 2016