Over the past few years, employee wellbeing has moved from being a consideration to an expectation in the workplace. Discussions have grown to encompass everything from physical to mental health, and businesses have been tasked with meeting evolving employee needs across this spectrum. As companies evaluate what this means for their benefits programs, workplace offerings and business cultures, they would be remiss to gloss over how employee wellness — and, relatedly, workplace hygiene — affects their risk profile. 

Improving workplace hygiene is much more than just a worthwhile pursuit for company leadership or human resources executives. It’s also important for risk managers to consider how hygiene fits into their overall risk management approach. Ultimately, workplace hygiene can influence employee health, business health and the bottom line. 

Hygiene, health and productivity

While COVID-19 presents a particularly resonant example of how infectious disease can affect the bottom line — as well as the broader economy — pandemics are not the only cause for concern. 

Other pathogenic threats affect the workforce every day, and some with big consequences. Consider the flu: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the flu caused 9 million to 41 million illnesses, 140,000 to 710,000 hospitalizations, and 12,000 to 52,000 deaths annually in the United States between 2010 and 2020. When employees are sick with the flu — even if they continue to work but aren’t operating at full capacity — productivity declines.

Acute respiratory infections including the flu are among the most prevalent causes of missed work, accounting for about one third of sick days. Yet, each year as we move into flu and respiratory infection season, we accept absenteeism as inevitable, rather than look for a proactive approach to minimize the disruption.

The common cold costs businesses up to 111 million workdays lost each year. This leads to a $16.6 billion loss in on-the-job productivity annually. Protecting the workforce from infection must be an essential component of a company’s risk mitigation strategy. 

This is especially important as companies reconsider their approach to sharing office space among employees. Regardless of how often facilities are used, the way people act and interact within the facilities matters. Considerations around sharing desk space, working in open-concept or closed-office settings, the accessibility of hand sanitizer and other hygiene-related decisions can influence disease spread. For many companies, in-person collaboration time is precious, and hybrid schedules mean employees have limited time to work together in person. So, absenteeism may take a more significant toll because it can cut into that limited in-person collaboration time. While it’s true that some elements of protecting employees from disease are not in a company’s direct control — after all, disease exposure and transmission can also happen in employees’ personal lives — risk managers need to consider ways to prioritize more hygienic, safer workspaces. 

Investment in resilience

Here’s the catch: We still lack a declarative, neutral body of scientific evidence to help risk managers do this effectively. There are, however, certain intuitive actions risk managers can take to support workplace hygiene. These include making hand sanitizer readily accessible, installing air-filtration systems and implementing policies encouraging workers to stay home when they are not feeling well. Notably, some of these smaller-scale interventions rely on employee cooperation and the value employees place on adopting them. 

For risk managers to know for sure which measures will be the most successful in protecting worker health, we need a more robust evidence base of scalable, unassailable hygiene science. Investing in hygiene research that conclusively reveals the best practices is critical. So is understanding the economics of implementing these best practices. Risk managers need to know which hygiene interventions in the workplace will be the most cost-effective to determine what is and is not a worthwhile mitigation tactic. Otherwise, risk managers themselves risk relying on interventions that may not pay off in terms of employee health or the company’s financial health. 

Reducing business risk

Infectious diseases will continue to pose challenges. COVID-19 shed light on our need to be better prepared for what’s on the horizon, whether it’s a pandemic or the next flu surge, or something else entirely. Rather than accepting that businesses will be short-staffed during cold and flu season, or writing off viruses as “something going around,” businesses need to take action to prevent disease transmission inside and outside the workplace. Creating effective risk mitigation plans, however, will require thorough research into what works and what doesn’t work, what motivates people to adopt hygienic habits, what interventions are the most cost-effective, and more. 

Gone are the days when we can sit idly by in the face of infectious diseases. It’s not only reckless to overlook the threat of infections as a risk to employees, but it is also bad business. Hygiene must be a risk management consideration — employees, businesses and the health of our economy depend on it.

David Wheeler is acting executive director of the Reckitt Global Hygiene Institute, a nonprofit established in 2020 to support research into hygiene health through focused research and other measures to benefit public health globally. He can be reached at secretariat@mail.RGHI.org.