Reducing the Rate of Sickness Absence

Background

The client worked in local government and was seeking improvements in performance and production.

It had been recognised that staff absence was running at a 5% level across the client's organisation. The annual salary bill, including on-costs was £10.8m. This covered the costs of 600 staff. Effectively, then, 5% of the annual salary bill was being lost to production - a sum of £ 540,000. By reducing this figure by 3%, not only would

£324,000 be saved, but this saving would add 3% to the annual hours of production total.

Issues

Discussions revealed the following issues which were affecting the situation:

• There was a culture of absenteeism within the client's organisation.
• Both Group Leaders (GL's) and Team Leaders (TL's) within the client's organisation were aware of the situation and the impact it was having on the delivery of the service
• There was a reluctance on the part of the client's managers to confront the issue
• The way the problem had been addressed by both the GL and TL groups in the past was to refer absentees to the HR Department
• There was marked resistance to the suggestion that the two groups of line managers should take responsibility for the absence of staff under their spans of control

This was a classic example of how existing behaviours in the workplace were affecting the commercial profitability of the organisation.

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