EMPLOYEES ATTITUDE TOWARDS STRESS AND ABSENTEEISM DURING COVID-19 CRISIS IN INDIAN HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY

The recent Covid-19 pandemic has created shockwaves across the globe and caused mental stress and depression leading to significant impact on an employees personal and professional life. Stress has profound impact on employees job performance, morale, job-satisfaction, behaviour, commitment and long-term productivity. Its malicious impact on employee wellbeing, job conduct and absenteeism cannot be ignored.The covid-19 crisis has imposed myriad of challenges on the healthcare professionals and stress levels have invariably soared, leading to depression, absenteeism, attrition, illness and lower morale to tackle the daily challenges in the healthcare industry. Thus, it becomes mandatory to focus on employees mental health, their attitude towards stress and absenteeism, especially during the crisis. The study attempts to understand the impact of work pressure of health-care workers during current pandemic as they have suffered maximumwork-stress due to overtime, workload and distressful work environment, leading to low job morale and absenteeism. The research design adopted is empirical involving a survey conducted on 108 healthcare workers through stratified sampling technique in sub-groups such as doctors, nurses, and frontline workers of private and government hospitals in the IT capital of India, Bangalore. The data was evaluated using descriptive analysis, regression test, correlation test, ANOVA, Chi square test through SPSS software.Findings show that the stress level among the employee in health-care sector leads to absenteeism and it has been particularly high during the current pandemic. Thus, healthcare sector should focus on such HR interventions that de-stress these employees and improve their morale to reduce absenteeism.