There is no easy time to run a business, but right now British firms are being squeezed from every direction, with rising costs, new regulations and growing pressure to operate more efficiently with smaller teams.
That pressure is being compounded by a worrying increase in economic inactivity, driven in large part by preventable ill-health. More people are falling out of work because support arrives too late.
The drive to operate more efficiently only makes this more urgent. When there is less room for disruption, every avoidable absence matters more.
When a colleague misses work because they are not well, the impact is immediate: shifts go uncovered, services are disrupted, and managers are pulled away to deal with problems.
The effect is clearest on the front line. One train driver misses a shift and thousands of passengers do not get where they need to go. A restaurant runs short-staffed and service slows or tables close. A warehouse loses capacity and deliveries are delayed. What might once have been easily absorbed is now felt directly.
Sickness absence can no longer be treated as a peripheral HR issue. In many sectors, it affects whether a business can run day to day.
Sir Charlie Mayfield’s Keep Britain Working Review, published last November, set out the scale of the challenge. One in five working-age adults is now out of the workforce, often due to ill-health, while employers face around £85 billion a year in sickness-related costs and the wider economic impact exceeds £100 billion.
Take hospitality. It is under real strain in London and across the UK. Margins are tight, labour costs are rising and tax pressures are growing. In that environment, an unplanned absence hits the bottom line.
It means overtime, agency cover, reduced service and lost revenue, all of which place additional strain on teams that are already stretched and leave many businesses on the edge.
It is the same story in retail, transport, logistics and construction, where the margin for disruption has narrowed and the cost of getting it wrong has increased.
I have served in the military, and worked in government, law and business. In every sphere, I have seen how quickly things can unravel when people do not get the support they need. I have also seen the enormous upside benefits if problems are caught quickly and colleagues given the support they need to succeed.
Most absences do not begin with a crisis. They start earlier, as manageable problems that, with timely support, could be resolved quickly. That is when intervention is most effective, and where the system consistently falls short.
As the Mayfield Review makes clear, delayed intervention allows short-term issues to become long-term absence and, in many cases, disengagement from the workforce altogether. By that point, the path back is slower, more difficult and far more costly.
Traditional workplace support only reaches a small proportion of employees, typically around 3 to 5%, even though the need is clear, because access is fragmented, engagement is low and support often arrives too late.
Many employees delay seeking help even when they recognise something is wrong, whether due to time pressures, uncertainty about where to go or a belief that the issue is not yet serious enough to justify intervention.
Issues that could have been resolved early are allowed to escalate, and businesses are left to deal with the fallout.
This feeds directly into the UK’s wider participation challenge, where fewer people in work means lower productivity, slower growth and increased pressure on public services.
This cannot continue. Businesses are already absorbing the cost, workforces are already being stretched, and in many cases reduced. Every delay increases the likelihood that more people will slip from short-term absence into long-term inactivity.
On top of this, employees should be given the power and have access to tools to make their own decisions about their wellbeing and take swift control of any health issues they may have. Our sector for example, has developed technology that allows employees to access qualified professionals - including nurses, doctors, psychologists, counsellors and social workers - within seconds.
Doing nothing, or acting too slowly, will compound the problem.
The solution is not complex, but it does require a shift in approach.
We urgently need to intervene earlier, providing support when something starts to go wrong rather than weeks later or once someone has already left the workplace.
That support also needs to reflect how people actually live, recognising that mental health, physical health, financial pressure and safety concerns are often interconnected rather than separate issues.
And it requires a recognition that work itself matters. Not just as a source of income, but as a source of structure, purpose and connection, all of which are harder to rebuild once someone has been out of the workforce for an extended period.
Employers are often the first to see when something is not right, and they carry the operational and financial consequences when people disengage. That puts them in pole position to act early and effectively.
As businesses look to automation and AI to operate more efficiently, there is a risk that avoidable absence is taken as proof that people are less reliable than machines.
They are not. But if we continue to allow preventable issues to escalate, we risk creating the conditions where that perception takes hold.
The Mayfield Review has made the diagnosis. What we need now is action.
This is about real people who could be in work, benefitting themselves, their families and our country, if they were supported at the right time.
Businesses cannot afford to keep losing people to problems that could have been prevented.
By intervening earlier and smarter, we can keep people in work and stop treating absence as something to manage after the fact.
Craig Cowdrey is co-founder & CEO at Sonder
