Sickness absence days cost UK businesses significant amounts of money each year and with some of these perhaps being avoidable it is worth enlisting the services of an Occupational Health Gloucester company such as https://www.insightoccupationalhealth.co.uk/ who can help to provide you with access to services and professionals that can hopefully reduce the instances of some of the sickness absence days that you experience. Reason why absences through sickness have such an impact on a company is because of the unplanned nature of them. As well as having to deal with the work that won’t be completed by the absent person the company may also end up having to enlist the services of temporary workers if the employee is going to be off work for a significant amount of time.
Each year national surveys are undertaken assessing the impact of these absences as well as looking at the reasons why employees are absent from work. This research is carried out by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and it helps to inform their work and best practice guides that you can find on their website. The results of the research are broken down into the different business sectors allowing companies to compare themselves to other businesses within the same business sector as themselves.
The latest report identified:
The most common reason for employees being off from work are minor illnesses such as colds, stomach problems and flu. It is thought that around 75 percent of all the absences in a year fall into this category. It is hard to reduce the instances of these kinds of illnesses occurring within a workplace unless you have a very strict cleaning regime and also have a sickness policy that requires people with stomach illnesses to remain away from work for a given period of time. This is one of the only ways that you can minimise the impact of these types of illnesses. As the minor illnesses can cover almost anything it is also important that employers track sickness absence to see if there are any particular trends in individuals’ absences.
The next biggest cause of work absences is stress and interestingly it is those in what would be classed as traditional ‘white-collar’ jobs that have more instances of absence due to stress. This is one area that businesses can try to have a positive impact on with having in place a stress policy and also making sure that staff members are given the opportunity to discuss any issues that they may have with their jobs. Occupational Health companies can give your employees access to confidential counselling services that they can use without fear of any of their work colleagues finding out. These work incredibly well in high pressure work environments.