Each year in the UK, 131 million working days are lost to sickness absence (ONS, 2014). This figure highlights the importance of maintaining a healthy and productive workforce at all times.  No organisation can avoid the inevitable; at one point or another your staff members will fall sick and as a manager you will need to take action to ensure their time off is managed correctly.

The Cost of Sickness Absence

Sickness absence alone can cost businesses a reported average of £609 per employee/per year (CIPD, 2014). To put this into perspective, for a 200 person organisation the cost of absence is more than £120,000 each year.

Loss of productivity in the workplace is the most significant cost when absence is concerned. What’s more; sickness payments, staff cover and administration all have a part to play in calculating how much employee absence is costing an organisation. All of these indirect costs could be having a huge impact on your business’ finances without you even realising it.

Unnecessary sick days can also be a costly concern for businesses. The CIPD has reported that non-genuine absence – or “pulling a sickie” – is becoming more of a known problem, but these absences are not easy to identify or put measures in place to reduce.

In order to cut unnecessary absence costs, causes of absence should be properly identified to enforce future preventative measures.

Here are three actions to take for managing employee sickness absence effectively:

1. Formalise absence procedures

Introduce a standard process across your organisation for when staff return to work after a period of illness. The HSE (Health and Safety Executive) and the new Fit for Work Scheme both offer support and guidance on putting a return to work process together for your organisation. This can include interviews and appropriate return to work documentation to help form a plan of action to get staff back into a normal work routine. Formalising procedures not only makes the process of returning to work fair for all employees, it also means that staff sickness can be documented properly for future reference to avoid future instances of sickness absence.

2. Use absence monitoring tools

HR tools such as the Bradford Factor can identify when sickness absences may not be genuine. The Bradford Factor measures levels of disruption caused by short, frequent and unplanned absences by evaluating when and how long each instance of staff absence occurred; applying a relative score. Using a Bradford Factor scoring system also means that employers are able to set benchmarks, so that when an employee exceeds over a certain score they will be subject to a formal interview or warning.

3. Avoid inefficient absence processes

Many organisations will monitor their employee sickness absences using manual methods such as paper forms, Excel spreadsheets and email calendars. Initially, it may seem as though these processes are more cost-effective than a paid-for software application. But using these ways to manage absence can be highly inefficient as spreadsheets and paper documents are easy to misplace, prone to human error and can take considerable time to administer. Using an automated sickness process can help to reduce time and error, which add to the cost of sickness absence.

By taking proper action and applying these processes across your organisation can help to significantly reduce sickness absence. Simply having measures in place, such as formalised procedures and accurate absence monitoring can discourage employees from taking sickness absence that isn’t genuine. Additionally, they help to identify which types of sickness absences are a real issue, allowing managers to attempt to reduce these absences along with the unnecessary costs associated with sickness.