Keeping healthy

According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s annual absence survey, the average annual sickness rate for housing associations is 4.2 per cent, or 9.8 days per employee. If absence is managed properly, you will have a rate no higher than 2.5 per cent (5.7 days per employee). If it is higher, calculate 1 per cent of your total pay bill for every percentage point above 2.5 per cent to see how much money you are wasting. This is on top of all of the other consequences of excessive absence.

So, how do you reduce absence?

Create an environment where people want to come to work: create an environment in which there are fair processes, clear direction and goals, properly trained line managers, and as much flexibility in working patterns as the service will allow.

Don’t appoint serial absentees: take up several years’ worth of references, with detailed breakdown of absences. If the applicant has consistently taken lots of days off every year, and there are no disability or pregnancy-related issues, don’t take them on. Don’t promote to management anyone with a record of persistent intermittent absence.

Return to work interviews: ensure that managers hold these each time someone returns from sick leave, even if it was only half a day. It shows people are missed. Research has shown this process has a significant impact on reducing absence.

Train line managers to manage absence: without training, they may be scared and seek to avoid managing it.

Don’t manage sickness as a disciplinary issue: have a sickness procedure aimed at supporting people to meet your attendance requirements. There’s no need to dispute the genuineness of reasons for absence, and there’s no distinction to be drawn between certificated or self-certificated absence. If someone can’t attend regularly enough to fulfil the terms of their contract, it’s reasonable to dismiss them after you have been through the supportive stages.

Have triggers for action in your procedure, and act: make it non-negotiable that managers pick up on the triggers and hold formal meetings as soon as these are reached, and that they record a very specific expectation for improvement over a set review period. Always invoke the next stage where the expectation is not met.

Develop a close relationship with your occupational health advisor: you can’t hope to manage absence effectively without a good occcupational health service. Never try to manage sickness by directly seeking reports from GPs or consultants.

Record and measure absence: require employees to notify absence to their line manager and the person responsible for centrally recording absence. Measure your lost time rate at least annually. If you follow all the tips above, you will soon start to see your absence rate plummet.

Helen Giles is managing director of homeless charity Broadway’s Real People HR consultancy

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