147.7 Million Days of Absence in Half a Year. Companies Must Secure Their Staffing Before a Shift Runs Short
The decline in the number of sick leave certificates has not translated into a significant reduction in the scale of employee absence. In the first half of 2026, Poles spent 147.7 million days on sick leave – almost as many as a year earlier – while the share of absences lasting 11 to 30 days is rising. For manufacturing, logistics and warehousing, this means a concrete risk: a plant may formally have a full workforce and still not be prepared to staff all positions on a shift. In operational work, it is therefore becoming increasingly important to plan not only the number of employees, but also replacements, the time needed to fill gaps and the ability to quickly increase headcount.
The latest data from ZUS (the Polish Social Insurance Institution) show that in the first half of 2026, 14.1 million medical certificates of temporary incapacity for work were registered, 2.7% fewer than a year earlier. The number of days of absence, however, fell by only 0.3% – from 148.1 million to 147.7 million. The difference is even more visible for certificates issued because of the insured person's own illness. There were 11.4 million of them, 2.5% fewer than a year ago, but they covered 123.1 million days of absence – 0.6% more than in the first half of 2025. The average single sick leave lasted 10.81 days.
From an employer's perspective, the conclusion is important: a lower number of L4 certificates (Polish sick leave notes) does not necessarily mean lower risk for work organization. What matters is not only the frequency of absence, but also its length, its concentration in particular teams and the ability to quickly replace absent staff.
Why does a lower number of sick leave certificates not mean lower staffing risk?
Most sick leave related to the insured person's own illness still consists of short absences. Certificates issued for a period of one to five days accounted for 44.5% of all such L4s. At the same time, the share of sick leave lasting 11 to 30 days rose over the year from 27.9% to 29.3%. The share of one-day sick leave also increased – from 7.8% to 8.8%.
For an employer, these two types of absence mean different risks. An absence of several weeks creates a staffing gap that has to be covered for a longer period. With absences of one or a few days, the greatest challenge is response time – information that an employee will not show up may arrive just before a shift starts. Especially in manufacturing, logistics and warehousing, the problem therefore cannot be reduced to the average absence rate in the company. What counts is how many employees will be absent at the same time, in which positions, and whether the process can run at the planned pace without them.
– In operational work there is no single safe absence level for every company. Five absences in a plant with several hundred employees may not matter much, but the same five people missing in one team or in positions requiring specific qualifications can already limit a shift's productivity. At Gremi Personal, as a temporary work agency, we therefore look not only at the number of people a client wants to hire. Our recruiters also analyze for how long workers are needed, on which shifts, with what qualifications and how volatile the demand is. Only then can the employer's real staffing risk be assessed – says Anna Dzhobolda, Strategic Advisor of the Recruitment Department at Gremi Personal.
The latest ZUS data clearly show why this risk cannot be treated as marginal. In the first half of 2026, the largest number of days of absence related to the insured person's own illness was caused by diseases of the musculoskeletal system and connective tissue – 21.6 million days, or 17.5% of the total. Mental and behavioral disorders accounted for 18.2 million days (14.8%), and injuries, poisoning and the consequences of external causes for another 17.2 million (14%).
For an employer, the cause of absence matters for many reasons, but from the standpoint of operational continuity one common problem remains: a position that was supposed to be staffed remains without an employee for a certain time. That is why absence management is increasingly hard to separate from recruitment, temporary work and resource planning. In manufacturing and logistics, workforce resilience today means not only having the right number of employees, but also the ability to restore that number quickly when actual staffing falls below the level needed to run the process.
How many employees does a plant really need to maintain production continuity?
This question becomes especially important in companies where individual stages of the process depend on one another. A nominal need for 100 employees does not mean that hiring exactly 100 people ensures operational security. Such a model works only on the assumption that the entire workforce is fully available.
In practice, sick leave is joined by annual leave, turnover, unfilled vacancies and periodic surges in demand. Workforce planning should therefore cover not only the basic staffing of the process, but also the point at which the lack of further employees begins to affect productivity, order fulfillment or the ability to keep all positions running.
This does not automatically mean a need to increase the number of permanent positions. For companies with variable demand, the solution may be a model combining a permanent workforce with the ability to temporarily increase headcount – through temporary work, a previously built pool of candidates or outsourcing of selected processes. A staffing plan based solely on the full presence of the workforce may be cost-effective on paper, but it leaves the company without a buffer against unforeseen staff shortages.
When does an employee's absence become a risk for manufacturing or logistics?
The line is drawn where the lack of staff begins to affect the execution of the process. A single absence can remain an HR event. Several or a dozen or so absences concentrated on the same shift may force a change of schedule, a reshuffling of employees between positions, the use of overtime or a cutback of some operations.
The risk grows if the missing employee cannot be replaced by just anyone. This applies to positions requiring specific qualifications, authorizations, knowledge of the process or prior training. In such cases, the mere availability of candidates on the market does not solve the problem – what matters is the ability to obtain the right employee at the right time.
– The biggest mistake is launching replacement recruitment only when the shortage begins to affect the process. If a company knows that its staffing regularly shifts by a dozen or several dozen people, it can prepare candidate sources, a temporary work model or a headcount ramp-up schedule in advance. Gremi Personal recruits employees for manufacturing, logistics and warehousing, among other sectors, so from the agency's perspective we see that the advantage does not lie solely in finding candidates. The key is shortening the time between the emergence of a need and the employee actually joining the process – explains Anna Dzhobolda.
In the case of foreign workers, this time must additionally account for matters related to legal employment and, depending on the worker's situation, the legality of stay and the required documents. Recruiting foreigners as a way of securing staffing therefore requires advance planning, not action taken only once a staffing shortage has occurred.
A staffing buffer should not be equated with hiring additional people without a specific need. From the company's point of view, what matters more is the ability to increase staffing within a defined time. The first step is to analyze one's own absence and turnover, not only company-wide, but by shift, position and period of the year. The second is to determine the minimum staffing level below which the process begins to lose productivity. The third is to establish how long it actually takes to fill the missing positions. Only by putting this information together can a company answer whether it needs a larger permanent workforce, a pool of candidates ready to be hired, temporary workers or flexible scaling of a specific process.
In the practice of a temporary work agency, this also means having to maintain continuous recruitment. Gremi Personal, which operates on the Polish labor market and specializes, among other things, in recruiting operational workers from Poland and abroad, uses its recruitment network to source candidates even when a client's demand changes within a short time. Such a model changes the role of temporary work. It does not serve only to handle seasonal peaks. It can also be an element of staffing risk management, when a company needs to flexibly increase the number of workers without permanently expanding its permanent headcount.
Why does the staffing problem gain importance as industry increases output?
The latest GUS data (Statistics Poland) add context to companies' staffing decisions. In July 2026, sold production of industry was 5.1% higher than a year earlier, and in January–July it rose by 3.6% year on year. At the same time, average employment in the enterprise sector in July was 0.8% lower than a year earlier.
This does not automatically imply a direct causal link between these indicators. It does, however, show the broader environment in which companies are increasing production while maintaining a cautious hiring policy. In such a model, every gap in staffing may matter more for the fulfillment of current orders.
– Workforce flexibility begins to have measurable business value when a company can increase staffing without building up a fixed cost at a level corresponding to maximum demand. In our work with clients, we see that the decision to use temporary work increasingly stems not only from seasonality. It is an element of risk planning: the company maintains a core workforce but at the same time has a mechanism prepared to increase the number of workers when production, absence or the number of orders grows. This makes it possible to treat employment as a resource that can be managed as operational needs change – adds the expert of the international employment agency Gremi Personal.
A temporary work agency must know the profile of the positions, the employer's requirements, the shift structure and the expected scale of employment fluctuations. In the case of foreign recruitment, the time needed to source candidates and legalization requirements are added. Staffing security should not be measured solely by the number of people entered in the schedule. A more useful question is how quickly a company can restore the required staffing when some employees become unavailable.