FEATURE INSIGHT
Absence management: time for change?
Businesses that invest in managing workplace absences can benefit from improved efficiency and performance with healthier staff and an even healthier bottom line, explains Kavitha Sivasubramaniam, freelance writer and editor
T he issue of workplace absenteeism is one that employers have been grappling with for many years. After all, there is no doubt that absence – especially when unplanned – costs businesses money, and also can have a significant impact on its overall performance. In turn, this can also affect its customers, and research has shown that this issue is one that is here to stay. Businesses also often forget that planned absences need management too. Many employees experience a colleague going onto maternity leave or taking an extended holiday without any plans being made to cover their time off. This is a failure of management because the organisation almost always has months of notice of such occasions. It’s therefore good practice to manage periods of leave so that their impact can be minimised. But how can employers go about this process? They must firstly evaluate the scale of the issue before they can identify how to address it. A significant problem While employees are one of a business’s most valuable assets, they are also one of their most expensive costs. For UK plc, the cost of absence amounts to more than £18 billion a year and is expected to rise to £26 billion in 2030, according to an analysis by Centre for Economics and Business Research commissioned
by workplace absence management specialists FirstCare (http://bit.ly/2lxZh8G).
work, be it planned or unplanned, additional workload and pressure is put upon their work colleagues. This can result in reduced productivity, especially with unplanned absence due to reduced workforce availability,” he explains. Of course, employers also have obligations to their staff with regards to health and safety, and monitoring absence can assist with this. Cost implications When it comes to the costs associated with absence, employers need to be aware that these takes various forms. Firstly, there are the company and statutory payments such as sick pay, which need to be made to the absent employee. Secondly, there is the question of what happens to the work the individual would have carried out had they not been away. If this simply does not get done, the employer’s efficiency is reduced. If it is picked up by someone who has to be paid for doing so, such as another employee working overtime or an agency worker, the cost of this has to be borne by the business. Finally, there are the costs that are harder to quantify: the contract which isn’t won because a document isn’t produced to a suitable standard, the stock which isn’t sold because a shop is short-staffed and queues for service causing customers to go elsewhere, and so on.
...an average of 6.3 days per
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s Absence Management 2016 survey (http://bit. ly/2fiAplO), carried out in conjunction with Simplyhealth, found that an average of 6.3 days per employee are lost each year due to absence. The most common causes of short-term time off were shown to be minor illness (95%), stress (47%) and musculoskeletal injuries (44%), while the most common causes of long-term absences were stress and acute medical conditions (both 53%), followed by mental ill health (49%). According to Jon Gilbert, product manager of workforce management (leave management) at human resources (HR) and payroll software and services provider NGA HR, in addition to the monetary expense of absenteeism, there can also be a heavy price to pay for the business in terms of its profound impact on both productivity and employee morale. “When an employee is absent from employee are lost each year due to absence
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | October 2017 | Issue 34 44
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