Le présentéisme au travail. Mieux évaluer pour mieux prévenir

Presenteeism at work, or coming to work while you are sick, is a phenomenon rarely studied in France because its large scale measurement was impossible until recently. In this article, we use the French Working Conditions Survey of 2013, the first national survey in the whole population to measure this phenomenon,in order to evaluate the determinants of its duration over a year. Determining job characteristics facilitating presenteeism can guide practices that limit it. Indeed, the literature has shown that this phenomenon resulted in significant losses for both the employer and the employee. Using counting models, we show presenteeism is a phenomenon fairly associated with the quality of working life. It is positively correlated first with a high workload, with tight time and pace constraints; secondly, it is also linked to the lack of autonomy or decision latitude. In addition, the support of colleagues and supervisors, which sometimes mitigates the combination of adverse workload and low decision latitude, appears to limit the duration of presenteeism. While the aim of productive organizations is to circumvent the phenomenon of presenteeism, these results suggest that employers should consider how to reduce the workload imposed on employees and give them real decision-making autonomy in the organization of their day-to-day work. Lastly, job insecurity is also correlated with workers' presenteeism, whereas the indicators of interesting work, as well as of well-recognized work, encourage workers to be absent when they are sick. Our study also shows that working conditions and work experience have important effects on presenteeism, but that these are partly mediated by their deleterious influence on the health of workers. We cannot, however, determine the direction of causality between health and work presence, but this is an important way for future research.