It is my experience that most employees who have had time off work for sickness return to work and continue working hard in their role but there are occasions when other interventions have to be put in place.
What is defined as Long Term Absence? What should we be doing about it?
These are just an example of questions I have been asked by managers in my years of working in HR and by their nature can be the hardest types of absence to deal with. There are so many factors you have to take into account and my advice is to treat each case on its own merits but follow a fair procedure.
Now that you decided upon the tools that you will use to monitor and measure the absence within your organisation, you can begin to review the types of absence in more detail. In my experience, short term or sporadic absences are the ones that are harder to track and sometimes go under the radar but they are the ones that are more likely to follow a pattern and cost the most to cover! Short term/sporadic absences are usually employees taking time off for different reasons with no underlying medical conditions and the ones where employees fail to provide adequate reasons for the absences (stomach bugs, colds, headaches, etc). I am not suggesting that these are not real conditions or that employees are fabricating the reason for their absence, I think it is just important to ensure that you have identified trends so that you can move forward in a collaborative way with the individual to ensure that they attend work and are being cared for and supported.
Managing absence effectively is basically about ensuring that you have a clear policy in place that not only supports the business objectives and culture but is transparent to all employees and managers. However, there are also elements of legislation that require organisations to provide its employees with ‘any term or condition that relates to incapacity for work due to sickness or injury’ including any provision for sick pay. For example, the policy must inform an employee of their rights and obligations (e.g. an employee is required to inform their line manager by 9:00am that they are unable to attend work due to illness) and be supported by a procedure for managers that is easy to follow and not too time consuming.
Did you know that the average cost of absence per employee is £784 per annum? Multiply that by the number of employees you have and you will see the true effect absenteeism has on your bottom line! Do you really know how many days your employees are missing? Are you monitoring it?
Hello, Welcome to my new HR blog!
Over the coming months, I will share with you my experiences and advice on a range of Human Resource issues, in a simple and easy to understand way!