This week’s release of a survey of sickness absence in the UK by the Office for National Statistics was full of surprises.

The biggest of all was that contrary to what many might think, the work-shy, sickie loving employee is a dying breed. In the last 20 years, the average number of working days lost each year per worker has fallen from 7.2 days to 4.4 days.

Even in the public sector – so often criticised for higher-than-average sickness absence compared to the private sector – things have improved.  The number of working hours lost per year has fallen by nearly 30% since 1993 (although it is still worth noting that absence levels in this sector are still 2013 are still well above those in the private sector in 1993).

For lovers of data and detail, the report comes complete with downloadable data sets and additional charts which are well worth a closer look if you want insight into how your sector compares to others or indeed, to predict the impact of age on levels of sickness absence.

I’ll leave that to you, but for the purposes of this blog, I’d like to concentrate on what I see as the real story which is this: while outright levels of sickness absence may be falling, preventable health issues are now the largest cause of sickness absence.

In 2013, back, neck and muscle pain accounted for more absence than coughs and colds (30.6 million days lost) while mental health issues such as stress, depression and anxiety accounted for half of that total again (15.2 million days).

At the end of last year our second annual survey into employee health and wellbeing found that this was an issue which was increasingly on the radar of HR and more broadly within organisations.  Yet, despite more ambitions to do more in this area and a greater recognition that proactive investment in health and wellbeing makes commercial sense, there is still a question as to whether employers are really doing either to take a strategic and proactive approach to the issue or, indeed, do anything at all.

If we want to aspiration into impact for our employees and the organisations we work for, it looks likely that employers will have to go further and faster on the issue than is currently the case.

For me this is a simple case of common sense. Every organisation  of every size will have its own statistics about sickness absence trends – and if they haven’t they should. Interrogating this data and working out the support – through benefits, HR policy and management practice – seems to be an obvious way of not only improving the performance of an organisation but doing a better job as an employer in keeping your best asset – your employees – the best shape.

Andy Philpott is sales and marketing director at Edenred – for more comment, insight and whitepapers visit www.edenred.co.uk/ehub

You call follow Andy on twitter @andy_philpott