Action on absence
Better management of staff absence can bring enormous benefits to any business. Here, Matthew Baldwin, chief executive of PMI Health Group and director of Absence Manager Ltd, shares his insight on improving your policies and procedures.
Cost benefit analysis
Successful businesses take the understanding and management of staff absence seriously.
It’s easy to understand why. Get it right and your business will benefit from:
- Improved business continuity
- Well planned workloads and cover
- Reduced costs
- Better employee engagement and retention by tackling underlying issues – such as under-resourcing, low morale, or ineffective management
- Increased productivity through better understanding and speedier return to work
Meanwhile, the costs can be seen in ...
- Salary costs or sick pay
- Lost production time
- Replacement staff costs
- Damage to customer satisfaction and potentially lost business
- Impact on staff morale.
A 2008 CIPD study found sickness absence cost an average of £692 per employee. A simple way to calculate the cost of absence to your business is to multiply your average daily salary bill by the total number of days lost to absence each year.
Knowledge is power
First you need to know exactly when and where it is happening, and why.
Up to the minute data will help you work out the extent of any problems, identify trends and ultimately tackle their underlying causes.
A clear absence policy including robust and consistent reporting procedures is essential. The policy should support your business objectives and explain the rights and obligations of employees when absent due to sickness.
The reporting process – whether through the company receptionist or a dedicated software system – should be clear and applied across the organisation. Such a system is essential to monitoring how the company absence policy is working.
Your reporting process should:
- record real-time data on every absence
- ensure line managers are automatically informed and kept up to date with absence
- provide data on individual, departmental or company absences for the management team.
- help you keep records and generate reports allowing you to monitor your entire absence policy.
Advanced software systems which use automated recording technology, such as Absence Manager, can help. They ensure consistent data capture, real-time reporting and tracking of absence and its management. Many can make sophisticated calculations such as:
- lost time rates: the percentage of a business or department’s total time available which is lost to absence
- frequency rates: average number of absences per employee as a percentage score
- Bradford Factor: monitors spells of absence to pinpoint regular short-term absentees.
Your recording system should help you monitor and better manage all aspects of employee absence including:
- comparative levels of short-term and long-term absence
- cases of recurrent absence
- absence levels in different parts of the company
- absence patterns within specific departmental teams
- patterns in the nature/cause of absence (e.g. musculoskeletal injuries, external lifestyle factors or stress)
- if there is more absence on certain days of the week or busy times of the year.
Managing short-term absence
Most absences are short-term (less than seven days) and good line management is essential to reducing the impact of this type of absence on your business.
Return-to-work interviews can identify short-term absence problems. And up to date analysis can help managers establish underlying issues which may be causing the absence. One-to-one interviews with employees should be conducted sensitively, professionally and at the earliest opportunity (within 24 hours ideally). Communicating with staff about absence is essential to tackling the problem.
Possible solutions might include:
- reallocating workload
- counselling or advice on childcare support
- In some case, disciplinary procedures.
A longer-term challenge
The role of the line-manager, and a robust absence policy, is again vital in managing long-term absence.
It’s vital you keep in contact with the employee – providing support and advice before matters escalate.
Obtaining advice from health professionals on employees’ medical conditions, and when they might be able to return to work, is useful in planning and resourcing work. With some problems, such as stress or musculoskeletal issues, early intervention by an occupational health professional can speed recovery and return to work.
Occupational health reports can also provide advice on current and future fitness for work, and whether it is possible to make short or long-term job adjustments to facilitate staff returning to work. OH experts can also work with you in planning and co-ordinating return to work plans.
In summary, it is essential to recognise and understand the cost of absence to your business. With the right systems and processes in place to record and monitor incidences of employee absence, and good support to line-managers in following policies, considerable cost savings can be realised.
