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Early signs of absence your dashboard never sees

Absence rates stay flat while burnout complaints rise. Which early signs of absence people do give off, and why no system ever records them.

Raymond Godding
10 August 20268 min read

On Thursday afternoon next week's rota gets stuck. Someone fixes it, as she almost always does: she moves two shifts, calls the stand-in she remembers from last year, and on her way out explains to the new colleague how the request form works. In the absence dashboard, her name shows zero days.

Early signs of absence are rarely medical and almost never measurable. They sit in the work people take on without it being assigned anywhere, in what they stop telling you on a Monday morning, and in the tone in which they say things are fine. A dashboard records who drops out. The run-up to it sits in what people say while they are still very much at work.

Why does the absence rate stay flat while complaints keep rising?

The Dutch National Working Conditions Survey 2025, carried out by TNO and Statistics Netherlands among more than 53,000 employees, shows two lines that do not move together. Sickness absence stayed at 4.9 percent in 2025, almost identical to 2024. At the same time the share of employees reporting burnout complaints rose from 19 percent in 2023 to 21 percent in 2025, where ten years ago it was 13 percent.

Those two numbers describe different things, and that is exactly the point. The absence rate counts the days people are not there. The complaint figures count the people who are there and are struggling. One in five employees reports burnout complaints, and by far the majority of them are simply at the table or on shift. Nothing about them shows up red.

Of the employees who called in sick in 2025, more than 22 percent said the absence was wholly or partly work-related, with high workload the most frequently named cause. By the time the absence rate moves, in other words, the signal is already old. Calling in sick is the last step of something that started months earlier, only not in a form the system could store.

Which early signs of absence do people actually give off?

The first sits in work that officially belongs to no one. In late July 2026 the Dutch HR platform Personeelsnet described the category of small, recurring chores nobody was hired for and that happen every week anyway: the printer that jams right before someone needs a document, the order that has to be placed before supplies run out. Individually such a task amounts to nothing. The cost sits in the interruption and in the remembering, because fixing a breakdown in between costs more than the minutes the job itself takes.

That work almost always lands with the same person: the one who notices it and finds it hard to leave things be. A quiet imbalance grows that is recorded nowhere. No HR system has a field reading "structurally carries more than her role allows for". What is not in a job description does not make it into a report either.

The second signal sits in language, and not in the answer to how someone is doing. It sits in what people do and do not tell you about their weekend on Monday morning. Personeelsnet cited Deloitte research showing that in the Netherlands 46 percent of LGBTI+ employees are open with all colleagues about their sexual orientation or gender identity. Another 42 percent feel comfortable only with a few trusted colleagues, and 9 percent are not open at work at all, citing fear of discrimination and of negative consequences for their career.

Put those figures next to a satisfaction score and nothing happens. Someone who weighs up every Monday what to share can fill in a perfectly respectable seven. Put them next to what is and is not said by the coffee machine and the signal is there. That weekly weighing up is work. It appears on no form and no hours are budgeted for it.

Why does nobody record those signals?

Because there is nothing to record in the shape a system expects data to arrive in. A signal here is not an event but a pattern: the same person solving it every time, and the same joke about the workload that gets slightly less funny each quarter. Each separate incident is too small to report, and the pattern is too slow to stand out. Looking back at January from March, you see nothing unusual.

On top of that, the person giving off the signal has an interest in nobody picking it up. Those who always fix things draw something from that. Saying it is becoming too much feels like admitting you cannot handle it, precisely where your value comes from. So the signal stays inside the conversation nobody has, until it announces itself in the only form the system does accept. This is the same movement described in what you suppress in change always returns: what you leave unnamed does not disappear, it picks its own moment.

What changes when you do hear the run-up?

No extra instrument is needed. What is needed is a different question inside the conversation you are already having. Alongside asking how someone is doing, a second question fits: what do you do in an average week that is written down nowhere? And where has your work quietly become something other than what you were hired for over the past six months?

Answers to those questions produce no figures. They are useful all the same, because they point straight at the load that never reaches a report, and they do so in the person's own words. When the bow is always taut goes deeper into the rhythm behind this: drawing and releasing, and why a bow held taut permanently loses its spring. This piece is about the step before that, about what you have to hear before you can recognise that rhythm at all.

At NarraTyx we work on that side of absenteeism prevention and sustainable employability: the story alongside the numbers you are already collecting. No score and no ranking, but the language in which someone describes their own load before a company doctor does it for them. The score is the beginning, the story completes it.

Which signal is moving through your organisation this week that has no field to go in?

Frequently asked questions

Early signs of absence are the shifts in behaviour and language visible months before someone calls in sick: taking on work assigned nowhere, saying less about themselves than before, or making a joke about the workload that gets slightly less funny each quarter. They are rarely medical and almost never measurable, because they are patterns rather than events.

A dashboard records events that fit in a field: sick notes, days absent, recovery reports. The run-up consists of patterns too slow to stand out and of tasks that appear in no job description. The gap shows in the figures: sickness absence stayed at 4.9 percent in 2025 while 21 percent of employees reported burnout complaints (TNO and Statistics Netherlands, National Working Conditions Survey 2025).

Ask about the work written down nowhere: what do you do in an average week that nobody knows about? Ask too where someone's work has quietly become something other than what they were hired for over the past six months. These questions yield no number, but they make the load visible in the person's own words, which is precisely the layer no report reaches.

No. Absence registration, occupational health services and employee surveys do work a story cannot do. A story-driven approach adds the layer that comes before them: the language in which someone describes their own load before a diagnosis is attached to it. NarraTyx is a reflection instrument without score or ranking and deepens what you already use: the score is the beginning, the story completes it.

Sources

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