Sick leave due to Covid has increased.
Where this reason for stopping represented 6% of total absences last year, 12% of sick leaves prescribed in 2021 are linked to Sars-Cov-2.
This increase is revealed by the annual Sickness Absenteeism barometer, carried out online with a sample of 2009 employees and by telephone with 401 managers or HRDs of private sector companies, from August 23 to September 24, 2021.
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For all reasons, 38% of employees were prescribed a work stoppage during the twelve months preceding the study.
A higher proportion than that observed in 2020 (36%) but below the 40% systematically crossed between 2016 and 2019, before the outbreak of the Covid, and the 2019 record (44%) in particular.
The health crisis seems to have particularly weighed on managers: 51% of them have been affected by sick leave over the past two years.
In detail, the stops for psychological disorders or professional exhaustion also increased over one year, from 15 to 17% of the total.
Conversely, absences for ordinary illnesses (flu, colds, etc.) fell to 25% of the total, against 30% in 2020.
Although more numerous than in 2020, the sick leave prescriptions are not necessarily respected by the employees.
A quarter of the stops are thus taken partially or not at all.
In addition, illness did not necessarily rhyme with rest: more than half of managers say they have worked during an illness (70% in 2020 and 58% in 2021).