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Absenteeism prevention: the story behind the figures

An absenteeism prevention approach that looks ahead starts with the stories behind the dashboard. Why figures lag and which signals arrive earlier.

Raymond Godding
9 min read

On Monday morning, the HR manager of a manufacturing company with two hundred employees opens the absence dashboard. The figure reads 4.7 percent, comfortably below the target agreed with the board, and the quarterly checkmark is green. Three weeks later the logistics team leader drops out, and in hindsight everyone can name the signals that had been there for months.

An absenteeism prevention approach that genuinely prevents rather than records starts with the stories people tell about their work. Absence figures are a look backwards: they count the people who have already dropped out and the damage already done. What people say about the work that quietly landed on their plate, about what keeps slipping, about what keeps them awake at night, runs months ahead of that figure. Sustainable employability is therefore a listening discipline more than a measuring discipline.

Why does an absence figure always lag behind?

Sickness absence in the Netherlands stood at 4.9 percent in 2025, virtually unchanged from 2024 (TNO & CBS, 2026). Look only at that number and you see stability. Beneath the same surface something else is moving: the share of employees reporting burnout complaints rose to 21 percent, against 13 percent a decade earlier. More than a third of employees, 37 percent, say additional measures are needed to address workload and work stress.

That gap between a flat absence rate and a rising burnout curve is the whole story. Absence is the moment someone can no longer summon the energy to show up. Everything preceding it, the months in which someone still comes in but leaves emptier each time, falls outside the measurement. 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 cited cause. That is information you only receive after the sick note has arrived.

An absence dashboard is therefore an excellent instrument for accountability and a limited one for prevention. That is not a criticism of the registration itself. Careful absence records are the foundation under every conversation with the company doctor and under every arrangement with an insurer. But a number that only moves once someone is already at home cannot, by definition, be an early warning.

What does the work that appears on no job description tell you?

In late July 2026, Dutch HR platform Personeelsnet described a category of work that exists in almost every organisation and officially belongs to no one (Personeelsnet, 2026). The coffee supply that needs restocking. The meeting room left in disarray. The printer that jams precisely when someone needs a contract. Nobody was hired for it, and yet it happens.

What makes that work heavy is not the time it takes but the interruption it causes. Someone deep in concentrated work who steps away to fix a fault pays more than the five minutes the task lasts. Getting back into the work costs effort, and that effort accumulates. On top of it comes the mental load of remembering: that supplies are running low, that a supplier still needs a call back. At the end of such a day, someone feels they have been busy without finishing anything.

This work rarely lands at random. It ends up with the colleague who notices and who finds it hard to leave things undone. Usually that is also the colleague who complains last. In any system built on job profiles, time registration and headcount, that load is invisible by definition. What was never agreed is never counted. What is never counted never appears on the dashboard. The only place it does surface is in the way someone talks about their week.

What does a forward-looking absenteeism prevention approach look like?

Measuring more often helps little here, because the constraint is not the frequency but what a measurement can capture. An employee survey and a preventive medical examination yield valuable information and belong in every organisation. They simply ask for a judgement on a scale: rate your workload from 1 to 10, rate your satisfaction with your manager. A 6 tells you something is there. A 6 does not tell you what.

That is where the difference between measuring and understanding begins. The question "tell me about a week that went well, and about a week that did not" produces no score, but it does produce a story in which patterns become visible. Which work quietly got added. Who gets called by default when something goes wrong. Which part of the job still gives energy and which part is merely processed. The score is the beginning, the story completes it.

The signals no questionnaire picks up sit in the language itself. Someone who starts talking about their own work in the third person, as though it no longer concerns them. The word must slowly displacing the word want. A manager who consistently refers to the team as they, where last year it was we. These are not diagnoses, and nobody should treat them as such. They are openings for a conversation held six months before the sick note.

Why is sustainable employability a listening discipline?

In early August 2026, ZiPconomy reported a court case that makes painfully clear what happens when that question comes too late (ZiPconomy, 2026). A self-employed construction worker was injured and could no longer work full hours. To calculate his loss of income, the court had to establish to what age he would have kept working had the accident not happened. He said seventy. His insurer argued 62, citing existing ankle and foot complaints. The court appointed an expert, who found that self-employed workers in construction stopped at an average age of 68.1 in 2021, and eventually settled on 30 March 2034. On that date the man will be 67 years and six months old.

An entire working life, reduced to a date in a damages calculation, determined by someone who had never spoken to him. The question of how long this man had wanted and been able to do this work was asked only once the answer could change nothing.

The same question sits on the table in every organisation, only there it is still in time. Employees aged 45 and over say they want to keep working until 65.7 on average and believe they could manage until 66.3 (TNO & CBS, 2026). The conditions they most often name are fewer hours or days and lighter work. These are not abstractions. These are arrangements you can make today with someone who is 51 now and does not want to be burnt out in fifteen years. Sustainable employability is the sum of those conversations, held while there is still something to choose.

What can you do with this on Monday?

Start small. In the next team meeting, ask which work has been added over recent months without ever being agreed anywhere, and who picked it up. That conversation takes ten minutes and almost always produces a list nobody knew about. Write it down, because from that moment it exists.

Then separate the conversation about how someone is doing from the conversation about how someone is performing. As long as those two share a meeting, answering honestly stays risky. Anyone who says the work is becoming too heavy does not want that sentence resurfacing in an appraisal the same month.

And give people a place to tell their story without a manager reading along. NarraTyx is built for that: a virtual story coach that listens, probes and connects, where the status of a conversation is visible to the organisation and the content is not. Module 1, the personal story, maps what drives someone and where the slack has gone. Module 2, the we-story, does the same for a team: where the tension runs, who carries what without it ever being named. No score comes out of it and no ranking, because a reflection instrument has no business passing judgement. What does come out is the language for the conversation that would otherwise take place only after the sick note.

We wrote earlier about the organisation when the bow is always taut, about the rhythm of drawing and releasing. What a narrative layer adds in the field of absenteeism prevention and sustainable employability is what lies underneath: not only that the bow is drawn, but who is holding it and why that person says nothing about it. How that listening sounds in practice is described under the personal story.

Most organisations know within a day how many people are off sick today. Almost none knows who will be off in four months, while the colleagues around that person often sense it long before. If you want to change that, do not start with another measurement. Which question could you ask someone this week whose answer you would rather not hear?

Frequently asked questions

Absenteeism prevention is the set of choices with which an organisation stops people from dropping out, rather than acting only once a sick note has arrived. Registration and absence guidance are part of it, but the preventive side lies mainly in noticing and discussing rising strain early: work that quietly got added, tasks nobody ever agreed on, and signals in how someone talks about their job.

Because an absence figure only moves once someone has already dropped out. Sickness absence stayed at 4.9 percent in 2025, virtually unchanged from 2024, while over the same period the share of employees with burnout complaints rose to 21 percent (TNO & CBS, 2026). A stable percentage can therefore hide a rising undercurrent.

Mostly in language and in how work is divided. Watch for someone who starts describing their own work in the third person, for the word must displacing the word want, and for a manager who suddenly calls the team they instead of we. Also look at work that was never formally assigned and consistently lands with the same person. These are not diagnoses, but reasons for a conversation.

No. Employee surveys, preventive medical examinations and solid absence records remain necessary and provide information stories cannot give you. NarraTyx adds a layer to them: the story behind the score, in language that makes clear why a 6 is a 6. The score is the beginning, the story completes it.

Sources

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