Almost half of employees regularly turn up to their job feeling too tired to work but according to a new survey the majority (86 percent) are not able to speak openly with their line manager about how tiredness is impacting on performance. The research from Westfield Health has found over one in ten (11 percent) of UK workers have purposefully taken a nap at work, and over a third (34 percent) say their mental wellbeing is reduced due to tiredness and fatigue. Fatigue, which is defined as extreme tiredness resulting from mental or physical exertion or illness, is stretching beyond work for UK employees, with 55 percent saying it is affecting them at home too. Almost half (46 percent) said they regularly turn up to their jobs feeling too tired to work, and more than a third (37 percent) say they tend to be more forgetful and make errors as a result of tiredness. This is a worrying concern when it comes to the built environment, particularly construction.

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A new report from the Office for National Statistics suggests that the number of sickness days taken by UK workers has almost halved over the past two decades to reach a record low. It dropped from an average of 7.2 days in 1993 to 4.1 days in 2017, and had been steadily falling since 1999. The total days lost for all workers last year was 131.2 million, down from 137.3 million in 2016 and 178.3 million in 1993. Since the recession, sickness absence rates have declined by 0.5 percentage points to 1.9 per cent last year. The reasons are not explored in the report but one possible explanation would be the growing number of people prepared to work when they should really take time off. A May report from the CIPD claims that the number of companies reporting a rise in employees going into work when they were ill had more than tripled since 2010 and warned that organisations should do more to discourage “presenteeism”.

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