What employee disengagement costs in France

The figure

Disengagement, absenteeism and turnover cost 14,840 euros per employee per year in France. That is the figure from the IBET© 2024 index, published by Mozart Consulting on 10 November 2024. It represents a rise of 12% in a year.

Across the country, the associated loss of competitiveness is estimated at 297 billion euros.

Primary source: IBET© 2024, Mozart Consulting, press release of 10 November 2024 (PDF, in French) · ibet.fr

Beware the figure of 13,250 euros

A figure of 13,250 euros per employee per year circulates widely on the French web. It is accurate, but it corresponds to the 2023 edition of the index. It is therefore a full year out of date, and it keeps being republished without being updated.

We know this all the better because we were using it ourselves until recently.

A figure of 13,340 euros has also been circulating since October 2025, attributed to Mozart Consulting with no year and no link to the source. We have not been able to trace it to any identifiable edition of IBET. We recommend not using it.

The historical series

IBET© edition	Annual cost per employee
2019 (2017 data)	14,580 euros
2020	14,310 euros
2023	13,250 euros
2024	14,840 euros

No 2025 edition has been published to date, checked on ibet.fr in August 2026. We will update this page when it appears.

The IBET index itself fell from 0.75 in 2023 to 0.72 in 2024, moving the classification from “disengagement” to “exhaustion”.

What is the IBET index?

IBET© (Indice de Bien-Être au Travail, the wellbeing at work index) is an annual study produced by Mozart Consulting, under the responsibility of Victor Waknine, founding partner. It measures the gap between expected and observed engagement, and converts it into a cost per employee.

That cost aggregates absenteeism, turnover, the disorganisation they cause, and the associated loss of productivity. It is not an invoice you can read directly in the accounts: it is an estimate of value not produced.

That is why it should be handled carefully, and quoted with its source, which almost nobody does.

What the figure does not tell you

A national average cost per employee is an order of magnitude, not a diagnosis.

It varies widely by sector and by size. An industrial mid-cap and a services SME have neither the same turnover nor the same replacement costs.

It does not translate mechanically into savings. Halving disengagement does not hand 7,420 euros per employee back to the company. Part of that cost is structural.

It says nothing about causes. Disengagement can come from pay, from line management, from the meaning of the work, from the organisation, or from the executive board itself. The figure raises an alarm, it does not diagnose.

Use it for what it is: an indication that the subject carries real economic weight, to be set against the cost of a support programme.

The link with the executive board

Most writing on disengagement deals with employees. Far less of it looks at the top of the organisation chart.

A Choiseul study carried out in 2025 among 670 company directors shows that 75% of them report feeling stressed every week, 36% every day, and that 9 in 10 see an effect on their company’s performance.

That is consistent with what we see on assignment. An executive board under strain produces three knock-on effects:

Slower, more short-term decisions. Prolonged stress degrades working memory and the capacity to arbitrate.

Degraded internal communication. When two board members stop talking, their teams stop cooperating. It is mechanical, and it shows up in lead times.

A contagious climate. The energy level of an organisation does not stay above that of its leadership team for long.

In other words: acting on the executive board is not a luxury reserved for the top. It is the point of application from which the effect spreads most widely.

Source: Choiseul study on the mental health of company directors, July 2025, 670 directors (PDF, in French)

How do you reduce absenteeism in a mid-sized company?

No single action is enough, and be wary of anyone who claims otherwise. The best documented levers are these.

Address the management causes before the symptoms. A large part of avoidable absenteeism plays out in the relationship with the direct manager, and therefore in what the executive board passes down its management line.

Reduce the load rather than promote resilience. Teaching teams to put up with a failing organisation moves the problem somewhere else.

Make the work legible. Contradictory objectives, decisions left unmade and shifting priorities produce exhaustion without anyone being at fault.

Measure before acting. Without a starting point, no action can be evaluated. That is the function of the initial audit in a JUMP programme.

What JUMP can do about it

We do not claim to solve a company’s disengagement with training. That would be false.

We work on one specific point: how the executive board operates, its capacity to decide, to communicate and to hold up over time. It is one lever among others, but it is the one whose effects spread most widely.

Over ten years, the companies we have worked with have seen a fall in absenteeism and stress, a rise in engagement, better productivity and cohesion. These are observations, not a guarantee of results.

The training programme for executive boards

Page checked on 18 August 2026. Next check when IBET 2025 is published.