Staff at small businesses are too loyal to pull "sickies", according to a Wanganui business leader.
Whanganui Employers' Chamber of Commerce president Jenny Duncan was commenting after the release of the Wellness in the Workplace report, which showed workers took 4.5 sick days a year on average.
The report said those in manual jobs and the public sector stayed home most, and put the cost of employee absences at $1.26 billion a year.
One in five employers also cited staff "seeing paid sick days as an entitlement" and suspected employees weren't really sick. But about half said genuinely sick employees would soldier on at work.
Ms Duncan said Wanganui employees were loyal to their bosses.
"In my experience, people come to work when they're quite ill," she said. "Most people don't treat sick leave as an entitlement."
Many Wanganui workers felt a strong sense of loyalty to their employers, especially if they were small businesses, she said. "People in small business don't throw as many sickies. There's just not that fallback.
"It's commitment to the job and loyalty to their boss. They're not shirking and taking the job for granted."
The study was done by BusinessNZ, Southern Cross and injury management provider Gallagher Bassett, and looked at 2012 data from 113 businesses and public sector entities, employing more than 97,000 workers.
It showed New Zealand workers were off sick less often than those in Britain, where the average was 6.5 days a year.
The median cost of absences for each employee was $837, which included absent workers' salaries, replacement costs and lost productivity.
This year, a Medical Council review into how medical certificates were issued sparked renewed debate around sick days. The proposed changes included providing more information on certificates and detailing which duties a patient was fit to perform. APNZ