Looking ahead to the July 4 holiday weekend, travelers will face daunting flight cancelations and delays. How do we know? During the Juneteenth and Father’s Day holiday weekend, more than 14,000 US domestic flights were canceled due to staffing shortages. And it’s not an isolated incident: Over Memorial Day weekend, airlines canceled over 7,000 flights.
The turmoil will continue. Delta announced that it will downsize its schedule by 100 flights a day between July and August. The culprit? A mix of weather, air traffic control staffing, and COVID-related absenteeism: “Increased COVID case rates contributing to higher-than-planned unscheduled absences in some work groups.” Other parts of the airline ecosystem have suffered, too; just two weeks after the end of mask mandates, the number of TSA employees contracting COVID increased by 50%.
In effect, airlines face both indirect and direct staffing shortages from Covid. Indirectly, a hangover from the lockdown periods has left staffing thin. More directly — and an issue few are talking about — Covid is making many workers sick so they can’t show up for work.
Covid Absenteeism Is A Costly Systemic Risk Issue
The pandemic has offered a vivid of example of how systemic risk — one of the four shocks reshaping the future of work — forces leaders to reengineer their businesses. Covid-19 catalyzed a new era of anywhere work in which distributed working became a necessity, then opened up the opportunity for new forms of hybrid and remote work.
While hospitalizations and deaths have decreased significantly, Covid hasn’t disappeared from our landscape; the end of May 2022 saw over 100,000 new cases a day, five times the daily case numbers from May 2021. As of June 20, the locations of infections had changed — moving away from the northeast into the rest of the nation — but the numbers remained stubbornly high with over 96,000 new infections reported. As we saw with airline travel, Covid-related illness can lead to spikes in employee absenteeism that negatively impact operations. And long Covid, according to a new study, affects 31% of Americans who contract the disease, including vaccinated people with mild cases.
Covid-Related Absenteeism Is A Hidden Cost That Can Be Quantified
Most organizations we talk to don’t have systematic measurements in place to manage this problem. In a new report, we share a tool to determine the costs that Covid-related absenteeism is having on your workforce. Among our key findings:
- The costs of Covid-related absenteeism are measurable at as much as 1.9% of revenue. The impact of Covid-related absenteeism will vary by company, business model, geography, and other factors, so we created a tool that clients can use to forecast their own losses. As an example, we simulated a model organization in our report:…
Read More:Airline Flight Delays Have An Underpublicized Cause: Covid-Related
