Reducing sick leave and absence in the workplace

How can we tackle absence in the office?

Absence and sick leave can have a disastrous effect on your business. Factors such as sick pay and temporary staff costs can have a serious effect on costs. And then there’s the issue of customer satisfaction and workplace morale. If work slows down, customers can be upset, and if the workload increases, your other staff can feel stressed out. If your run a small business, like bitcoin rush, sick leave can be critical. Reducing sick leave and absence is an important step to the success of your business.

Absence and sick leave can be a difficult issue to tackle if you don’t know how and why it is happening. Understanding the root cause is crucial to getting rid of the issue. You need to make sure your management team has accurate and up-to-date data. If they don’t, finding out if your company has an issue with absences will be almost impossible. It also means you won’t be able to identify and fix the underlying issue.

The foundation to any case of sick leave is a clear absence policy. Have processes that rely on real-time data to see every instance of absence. Line managers can be automatically informed, who then can act accordingly to the information. There are various kinds of software that can help automate this process.

Preventing absence

A straightforward absence policy is the first step towards prevention. What sure it clearly states the actions that need to be taken when an absence occurs. This will help a business when there’s an unexpected absence. Depending on the reasons for the absence, this might mean a health professional intervenes with the individual if they have an ongoing illness. Advice from health risk consultants is important to make sure that any policy is accurate and within reason. Make sure a policy is built around your business.

Prevention is the best method to affording illness and injury in the workplace. If you don’t have a full understanding of the risks in your industry, then a full health screening would be a good place to start.

In-depth and comprehensive tests provide information ranging from blood pressure and body fat to hearing and lung function.

Removing stress from the workplace

Mental illness and stress result in more than half of working days being lost every year. It is one of the most important factors towards workplace absence. With fewer healthcare options for helping employees with stress, sometimes the responsibility will fall to the employer.

Having a programme in place, or a workplace health professional can help with lessening stress when it occurs. Early intervention is very important in tackling growing stress levels.

What options can you give employees to lessen stress?

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is short-term therapy designed to help people change negative thought processes. This can be used to help employees return to the workplace. Referrals can be offered to employees via healthcare benefits, such as employee assistance programmes.

A supporting factor to EAPs is that they offer staff access to a dedicated telephone support line. This enables them to contact a trained counsellor at any time of the day.

If you have a small business, then restraints with the budget may mean that you have to offer a flexible health insurance scheme. Focus on tackling the key issues of absence. Have a policy in place to combat the more common treatments as classed by the NHS. Being able to treat non-urgent issues means that employees are given support and can return to work much more quickly.

If you have the budget, offering physiotherapy, chiropractic and mental health benefits can address most issues employees suffer from. You may even be able to offer gym discounts and online health risk assessments.

Having a health plan in place

A cash plan can be used as a benefit to employees, and for tax purposes, this means that employees will only pay tax on the premium. Another benefit to this is that it can help increase staff morale. This will also help with work ethic. You may even be able to offer family plans for a slight increase in cost.

You could also consider including a dental plan. Dental problems can be a big issue in some cases, so this issue should not go ignored. Dental health also helps towards general health and mental wellbeing.

If an employee needs a long-term absence. The individual may need a case manager to help plan appropriate management and medical interventions. Specialists can be used to help advise SMEs on the best strategies concerning health and wellbeing.