If an employee persistently claims illness on a Monday morning and seems to be the unluckiest person in Britain – food poisoning one week, a touch of TB the next – how should organisations react? Sarah Fletcher looks at strategies to combat suspicious staff sickness and its damaging impact upon business.

As business is likely to invest heavily in its workforce, time lost to illness can be expensive. Extended periods of absence are, in business terms, far better than taking a day off sporadically – short term absence is difficult to plan for, affects productivity and damages the morale of staff forced without warning to cover for the missing employee.

The CBI estimates that 13 per cent of sick leave is due to false illness claims, which amounts to 25 million lost working days each year at a cost of £13bn to the economy. Although it may seem suspicious if an employee regularly phones from their death bed on a Monday morning claiming they can barely lift their arm to hold the receiver, identifying fraudulent illness claims and disciplining the worker is a complex and extremely delicate problem.

If staff feel falsely accused they can feel mistrusted and undervalued, leading to the risk of poor productivity, resignation and even legal action for discrimination. Despite the threat of damaging workforce relations, the huge costs to business mean dubious sickness claims cannot be ignored.

Duvet days
‘Duvet Days’ – days the employee can take off at a moment’s notice to spend some more quality time with their bed – are offered as a way of combating the temptation to claim you can’t come into work because you have the plague, a killer bout of chicken pox or you’ve been snowed in (in the middle of summer).

The Duvet Day strategy suggests staff are getting an added perk, which could improve their loyalty to the company and make them think twice about claiming too many days off for diseases that to the employer sound, at best, dubious.

This can be built into the annual holiday entitlement so staff don’t actually get any more time off; yet it seems like a bonus because employees can phone in without warning to say they’d like the day in bed. Duvet Days offer the added benefit that when an employee takes time off, it’s a more needed break than simply to make up holiday entitlements – the added rest can boost productivity at a time when it may be particularly lagging.

However, this practice may be seen to condone staff taking time off when they just don’t feel like coming into work. Instead of disciplining the rogue employee, the company rewards them with an unscheduled day in bed. Kieran O’Keeffe, policy advisor at the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), argues that duvet days have a negative impact upon business by “condoning the concept of a sickie”.

Matt Hardman, media and PR officer at the Forum of Private Business (FPB), agrees but adds the relaxed atmosphere suggested by duvet days might improve the employer’s relationship with staff.

Prove it or lose it – the nurse police
Some organisations are taking a firmer line on dubious sickness claims by using nurses to expose the rogues. The bed-bound employee must phone in and convince the medical professional that they’re genuinely ill – and remember, nurses know whether your symptoms really show you have a rare strain of life-threatening tropical malaria.

Active Health Partners provide this facility to over 60,000 employees and clients such as O2, Alliance and Leicester and Rochdale Council, where absence rates have dropped by 40 per cent since 2002 as a result. Chief executive Ingolv Urnes defends the scheme against the TUC’s claims that it suggests employers don’t trust their staff: “It’s often the first reaction of people,” he admits, but points out that the nurses are available 24 hours a day and are interested in providing sound advice to help employees get better.

Although he reports the reaction from staff as “typically very good”, there has been a backlash from disgruntled workers who object to revealing the secrets of their sick bed to a nurse: “Of course, there’s always a fraction of employees that don’t like it at all – you have to question why that is.”

Illness interviews
However, this is arguably just an extension of the traditional practice of interviewing employees on their return to work following sickness absence. Whether a business outsources its absence monitoring to a nurse in a call centre or conducts in-house interviews with the line manager, the principle of requiring staff to explain and justify the illness is the same.

Defenders of the strategy argue it shows staff the business cares about their welfare and want to make sure they aren’t part of the delightfully titled ‘mucus troopers’ – the workers identified by the TUC as soldiering on despite being close to collapsing. However, many staff still suspect that employers conduct ‘return to work’ interviews because they aren’t convinced the employee was genuinely ill.

Fiona Fritz, HR manager of Grampian Country Pork, says an interview reduces absenteeism because staff know they’ll have to justify their illness claims: “You can keep short term sickness low if you communicate to staff that they will be interviewed, and then actually do it – a culture soon grows if people know that they will be spoken to.” This should cut out the proportion of claims that are either dubious or for relatively minor complaints – If an employee is genuinely too ill to rise from bed, the threat of a return to work interview is unlikely to have them crawling to the office to avoid it.

Julie Preston, training operations manager of Scottish Prison Service, argues action for absenteeism must be immediate and practise zero tolerance; if an employee is allowed a certain amount of sick days before action is taken, this can be seen as an entitlement to take this as extra annual leave.

Scrap sick pay?
Some employers claim interviewing staff on their return is not a strict enough approach to combating false sickness absence. Health and safety officer Alan Jones argues that offering any sick pay encourages employees to take time off by letting them believe they are entitled to what could essentially amount to extra holiday.

Hardman says that although all employees have the right to be paid if they are genuinely ill, providing sick pay is an extra incentive to take time off at short notice whether they are ill or not.

O’Keeffe argues that scrapping sick pay is a dangerous policy: “If someone’s genuinely ill there’s no benefit to them or the employer to have them drag themselves into work,” he says. Encouraging unwell staff to come into work by removing sick pay will spread germs around the office, damage the employee’s productivity and prolong the illness.

Best practice for addressing dubious sickness absenteeism, he says, is regular and open dialogue with staff to ensure they are satisfied with their work. O’Keeffe argues clear, concise policies employees agree upon will decrease the potential for a negative backlash.

Solving suspicious sickness
Fraudulent sickness is a major problem for business yet unfortunately difficult to resolve. Hardman says it’s becoming all too easy for employees to diagnose their own illnesses, which is at best unreliable. However, the NHS does not have the resources to assess an employee every time they have a cold, so it’s down to business to deal with sickness directly.

Preston is not optimistic that business can do anything to stop employees from making false sickness claims. If so, procedures to address this are ultimately pointless: “Stricter policies and procedures will not solve the problem. At best they’ll make it a little more difficult for those employees who abuse the system, though they’ll find a way round it eventually.”

Communicating with employees who have taken time off, addressing any problems they may have with the workplace and setting policies in place to deter them from taking random days in bed when they just don’t feel like work are solid ways of combating the major problem of false illness claims.

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