Absence levels rose last year in the face of employers’ best efforts to promote employee well-being, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
Its annual Absence Management survey out today reveals that the average employee took 8.4 days off work over the past 12 months compared with 8 days the previous year.
Yet at the same time, the proportion of employers with well-being strategies in place rose from 26% to 42%. So what’s gone wrong?
The CIPD suggests that attempts to promote well-being and cut absence are being undermined by a lack of good people management and effective work organisation. But the survey results indicate some real problems within HR.
One in four employers fail even to record their annual employee absence rate and just 13% evaluate the effectiveness of their well-being initiatives. Many admit that they fail to communicate the value of their efforts to employees.
One problem faced by many organisations is that they simply don’t know which approaches work and which are a waste of time.
A recent IRS survey compared the extent to which HR departments use certain absence management techniques and the ones they think are effective [subscription required]. From this, it appears that some tools could be better exploited – most notably targeting individual employees, gaining line-manager buy-in, and financial incentives.
The survey results are backed up with some good case studies based on the experiences of Transport for London’s approach to back pain and work-related stress [subscription required] and Westminster City Council’s successful efforts to engage line managers in the process [subscription required].
For those without an XpertHR subscription, however, here are some of the highlights of the CIPD’s findings:
• absence increased from 8 days to 8.4 days on average between 2006 and 2007;
• as a proportion of working time, absence rose from 3.5% to 3.7%;
• employers believe, on average, that 16% of absence is not genuine;
• the average cost of absence increased from £598 to £659, and in the public sector from £680 to £732;
• local government employers saw absence drop from 4.8% to 3.7%, but health service employers saw an increase from 4.6% to 5.5%;
• stress-related absence rose in 40% of organisations and fell in just 9% last year; and
• the biggest causes of work-related stress are workload (34%), management style (16%) and organisational change (14.3%).
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