By Claire Michelle
Ask any business owner in French-speaking Switzerland what their main cost items are, and they will cite payroll, rent, social security contributions, raw materials or IT expenses. Never disengagement. Not because it does not exist, but because it does not appear as a line item in the Swiss chart of accounts. It is absorbed into aggregated indicators: a slight drop in productivity here, a sick leave there, a key employee who does not renew their contract, a repeated mistake in a process that cannot be stabilised. The sum of these micro-failures makes up what labour economists call the implicit cost of degraded human capital, and in an SME where every position matters, that cost can prove existential.
In Switzerland, a study commissioned by AXA on mental health (AXA Mind Health Study) and conducted by the Centre for Economics and Business Research estimates that the annual GDP loss caused by work-related health problems — of which disengagement is an early stage — amounts to CHF 17.6 billion for the Swiss economy as a whole. That is nearly one and a half times the annual budget of the canton of Vaud. And, for the most part, it is a bill SMEs pay without even knowing it.
The analytical difficulty lies precisely there: disengagement does not generate a single, clearly identifiable cost, but a constellation of diffuse expenses spread across several budget lines.
Take absenteeism and presenteeism, for example. According to a University of Fribourg survey, 7% to 14% of Swiss employees would be in quiet-quitting mode, through presenteeism or absenteeism linked to a professional situation that does not suit them. This form of absent presence is doubly costly because, beyond the salary paid without any performance in return, the employee occupies a role without truly filling it, while consuming managerial energy to be supervised, supported and compensated for. And when this silent disengagement turns into a definitive break, the numbers emerge from the shadows and become stark. Deloitte currently estimates the cost of turnover for qualified profiles at between CHF 20,000 and CHF 45,000 per departure. For an SME, losing two or three key people in a single year is no longer merely an organisational challenge, but a direct and substantial drain on operating liquidity. Know-how capital disappears, taking with it the investment previously made in training and onboarding.
However, the most damaging impact is arguably the cost of contagion, all the more destructive in organisations of human scale. While the close hierarchy of an SME makes disengagement difficult to hide, it paradoxically also makes it easier to spread. Resignation is contagious: in a team of ten, a single openly demotivated employee can, simply by dragging down the atmosphere, erode the engagement of several colleagues within a few months. What was initially an isolated case then becomes a systemic issue, threatening the culture and even the long-term viability of the company itself.
Added to this is the particular cost structure of the Swiss market. In Switzerland, total social charges range from 20% to 40% of gross salary, with the employer’s share generally between 12% and 20%. A disengaged employee earning a gross annual salary of CHF 90,000 actually costs their employer nearly CHF 108,000. Every day this employee operates below full potential represents a real loss — measurable, but one that appears nowhere.
It is clear that disengagement will remain invisible until Swiss SMEs decide to make it visible. This does not require complex tools, but rather the willingness to ask the right questions: what is our actual absenteeism rate? What has our turnover been over the past three years, and for which profiles? On average, how long does recruitment take? What share of our projects is delayed for non-technical reasons? Set against total wage costs, these indicators make it possible to build what could be called a human capital balance sheet — a management tool as legitimate as the traditional financial dashboard, and vastly more predictive of medium-term performance.
At a time when the margins of our SMEs are being squeezed by a record-cost environment, management through engagement has become a survival imperative. Ignoring the true value of human engagement is no longer a mere management shortcoming, but a strategic failure that could, in time, jeopardise the very continuity of our businesses.
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