Sponsored column: Are Yorkshire businesses feeling the pain of employee absences?

First thing’s first – employee absence from the workplace is an inevitability. Let’s face it, people unfortunately fall ill and no amount of planning can safeguard a business from an individual’s unexpected short or long-term period away from work.

But exactly how big is this problem?

The latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show that in the last complete year of research (2016), the average worker was absent for 4.3 days over the year.

This stat in isolation may mean very little, but compare it to previous years’ metrics and it is actually the lowest recorded absence rate since analysis began in 1993. Incidentally at that time, the equivalent figure peaked at 7.2 days per person, per annum.

It is therefore clear that steps have been taken to improve the workplace absence issue, which is encouraging. But these 4.3 days per person still add up to an estimated 137.3 million working days lost due to sickness or injury, in the UK, in a single year.

Yorkshire firms therefore need to ask themselves how much this issue is costing them. I would encourage businesses to think about some of the following key areas:

The cost of not knowing

Time and again Cascade research reveals that approximately 35 per cent of businesspeople with HR responsibilities don’t know their absence rate. And as the age-old saying goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. So, steps firstly need to be taken to get a better grasp of the organisation’s own absence landscape. This is far easier when HR records are digitised.

The cost of presenteeism

It may sound odd to mention this but presenteeism – coming in to work during periods of genuine ill health – is almost as big a problem as absenteeism.

Employers must therefore communicate clearly so that staff know they are absolutely permitted time off to recuperate should they be physically or mentally unwell. This applies irrespective of workloads, deadlines or commitments to colleagues etc.

The cost of the absence itself

It is helpful to know what fiscal cost a period of absence has on the business. Things to consider include sick pay; the need to arrange for and pay temporary cover; and a potential drop in output, productivity and/or customer service levels when the team is stretched.

In a competitive environment, when margins are being squeezed, these costs can be difficult to bear. However, again, if the costs are apparent, at least steps can be taken to lower them.

The cost of peer morale

If a strong organisational culture is apparent, peer support for the absent employee is likely to be strong. But if an individual is known to, quite simply, play truant, colleagues who remain in the workplace to ‘pick up the pieces’ may soon become disengaged with the situation.

This underlines another key reason why the absence picture within a business must be clearly acknowledged – otherwise valuable staff could soon be lost.

The cost of poor absence management

Greater analysis into absence trends can often uncover interesting insight. Of course many root causes of sickness absence cannot be prevented. But sometimes data interrogation reveals peak absence problems in specific departments, for instance.

This could point to a line management issue or a disregard for wellbeing within that team perhaps.

It may also highlight the need for further training or at least additional investigation. In the modern business environment, it should be easy to run a department-specific or company-wide absence report, with comparison points, in only a couple of clicks of a mouse.

Without this insight, potentially damaging patterns of behaviour could continue unnoticed – something no organisation can afford.

This is admittedly a complex topic and not an area of HR where ‘one size fits all’.

However, as Yorkshire businesses embark on a new year, there is no better time to wipe the slate clean and re-evaluate how a topic like absences is going to be managed. With flu season upon us – and the headlines yesterday dominated with talk of ‘blue Monday’ – there’s no time like the present to start making a change…

Cascade HR is part of IRIS Human Capital Management. As a leading provider of HR and payroll software with a suite of products, the Leeds-headquartered tech firm works with micro-businesses and SMEs, up to organisations with 10,000+ employees. For further information visit www.cascadehr.co.uk.