Companies getting tough on the sickie (May 05)

Business struggles with work attendance

The chief executive of British Airways, Rod Eddington, was reported to have written to all BA employees complaining about their appalling sickness record - staff there take an average of 16.7 days off per year, at a cost of around £58 million. Tesco has also announced that under a pilot scheme in some stores, it would no longer pay staff for their first three days of sickness.

Companies, aware of the relative shortage of labour, are anxious to get the most out of the staff they have, and are keen to see a reduction of both the genuine and contrived varieties of absence.

New figures from the annual CBI/AXA survey, published in May, revealed that employers estimate that 25 million days were lost last year through non-genuine sickness leave. This accounts for 15% of all absence, at a perceived cost of £1.75 billion. Although introducing policies such as withdrawing sick pay could help to cut the number of frequent, short-term absences, it could also hit staff morale, which in turn could affect productivity.

Interestingly, the ‘80/20’ rule also applies to sickness absence with 80% of absence short-term, most of the cost of absence comes from those away from work for long periods of time. The UK has one of the worst records in Europe in this regard - only 15% of workers return to work after long-term absence here, compared with 30%-50% in Europe and 50% in the US.

With long-term absence costly in terms of money and time, but short-term absence the immediate focus for most employers, companies face a twin challenge. While they clearly need to tackle long-term absence proactively, focusing on the small percentage of staff that may be ill neglects the bulk of the workforce that aren't, but who may be at risk of taking time off. What this means is that companies will have to intervene more and more in their employees' health in order to maintain a competitive and efficient workforce.

Proactive management of health risks in the workplace will have to become a high priority for employers. Traditionally, the bulk of company expenditure on managing healthcare issues is focused on ill people - a minority of the workforce as a whole. However, given that some 75% of the occurrence of illness is 'new', according to research from US body Health Enhancement Research Organisation (HERO), it makes sense to intervene before sickness occurs.

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