By Les Kertay, PhD, ABPP, LP

Chief Medical Officer
R3 Continuum

By far, the majority of workplace absences result in return to work (RTW), a fact sometimes obscured by those that don’t. Most of our attention is drawn to outlier claims. Let’s turn our attention to successful claims and to what they can teach us.

Faced with adversity, most people at least return to baseline, and often they come back stronger. In other words, people have a natural tendency to resilience. That is what happens with an employee has to leave work due to illness or injury and then returns. I am convinced that we have a lot to learn from RTW successes, perhaps even more than from the failures.

Understanding resilience falls in the field of positive psychology, which is the study of the conditions that contribute to optimal functioning of people, groups, and institutions.¹ Since the 1990s, this branch of psychology has emphasized human strengths, the natural tendency to resilience, and the importance of a multifaceted understanding of what contributes to human joy and fulfilment, part of which is work and all the benefits associated with it. The questions for integrated absence management are: what characterizes those who successfully return to work, and what can we learn and apply?

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