Aviva’s managing director of savings and retirement, Lindsey Rix says: “Employers have a really important role to play both financially and emotionally in supporting their workers through periods of ill health and facilitating their return to the workplace where this is possible.”
Managing staff absence is one of the top reasons why companies ask me for help, and it looks like I am going to be increasingly busy.
It’s not that companies miss the companionship of their employees that prompts them to act on absence, there is a real impact on bottom line profitability when employees fail to attend work.
A recent article in Bloomberg BusinessWeekmagazine has identified that it takes a worker in the United States just four days to do the same amount of work that a UK worker does in five days.
It reminds me of my days working in a HR function in a large manufacturing company. I’d often end up in a disciplinary meeting with an employee and their trade union representative discussing the employee’s attendance.
You can’t really issue a warning for his attendance the trade union representative would proclaim, after all when he is here he is one of your best performers!
But, I would respond if only he was here more than he was not I could be spending my time dealing with something much more interesting.
Improving the attendance of your employees could be the secret to unlocking the potential productivity of your company.
So, it is something of a surprise to read in Employee Benefits as many as 35percent of employers do not have a strategy for reducing sickness absence amongst their workforce.
Employers adopt two main approaches to improving attendance. Carrot and Stick
The first is to discipline anyone who reaches a level of absence during a specific period. The use of this approach has doubled in the last twelve months.
Limiting the number of days absence for which sick pay is provided is another stick-based approach that is being increasingly used with 36% of employers in 2018, a rise from 26% in 2017, adopting the strategy.
The question is whether employers can seriously expect either of these stick-based approaches to reform the poor attender, or if the disciplinary is merely a process that must be gone through to get rid of someone who is a habitual poor attender?
Does limiting paid sick leave perhaps ignore what we are taught about the hygiene factors of motivation?
The other side of the coin is to incentivise attendance with additional payments or perks. This is an approach that is also gaining in popularity with the number of companies using it tripling in the last twelve months.
Although the return to work interview has seen a 4percent rise in usage it is the most popular strategy for reducing staff absence. I have always advocated that waking-up and wanting to roll-over and go back to sleep feels like a less attractive option if you know you are going to have to explain your absence when you go back to work. It is just unfortunate that so many managers don’t know how to conduct a return to work interview so that it adds value to both the employee and the employer. In many ways the return to work interview can be an important element of the occupational health process.
Yesterday Aviva published research that identified the importance of health education in keeping older workers in work and demonstrating that it is an important element in demonstrating that an employer is supportive of their employees. But the research from Employee Benefits suggests that there has been a significant drop from 58% to 50% in the number of companies that have an active health education programme.
The common theme seems to be a mixture of carrot and stick approaches to absence management. Whilst there is nothing necessarily wrong with this mix of approaches, it does feel a little bit rooted in the past, when attitudes to work were somewhat different. Millennial workers seem less interested in the master and servant type of relationship with their employers and respond better to one that is more akin to a customer supplier relationship.
Perhaps the best approach for employers is to abandon their focus on absence management and instead concentrate on identifying the things that motivate people to attend?
Like school teachers, managers seem to spend most of their time dealing with the naughty pupil who sits at the back of the class. The average/acceptable employee and the high performer get overlooked.
Employers would benefit from adopting the same positive disciple strategy that many schools are adopting in order to improve attendance, attention, and results.
The straight-forward approach involves, setting behavioural standards with both clear consequences for not fulfilling those standards and the rewards for compliance.
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