Associations of Perceived Privacy at the Workplace With Short Sickness Absences in a Cohort of Finnish Office Workers.

Objective: To investigate perceived task privacy in 2022 associated with short (1-3 days) self-certified sickness absence (SA) in 2023.

Methods: A prospective cohort of 1400 Finnish office workers with survey data in 2022 about, for example, task privacy, telework, and office type were linked with employer-owned register data of SA in 2022-2023. Poisson regression models were used to obtain risk ratios with 95% confidence intervals.

Results: Each one-unit increase in task privacy was associated with a less likely short SA (risk ratio, 0.83-0.89; 95% confidence interval, 0.74-0.97), also across the amount of telework in 2022. The association was only statistically significant in activity-based offices.

Conclusions: Each one-unit increase in perceived task privacy at the office was associated with less likely short, self-certified, 1-3 days SA. Task privacy is an important factor to be considered in offices.