National sickie day - how much is this costing your business?

The first Monday in February is often dubbed ‘national sickie day’ – a day when staff are most likely to take an unofficial day off.

According to new research, from Credit: Lewis Whyld/PA Archive, as many as 375,000 will take today off sick, with half of the country's bosses admitting they do not always believe those who phone in sick.

Sickness absence costs UK businesses billions each year in loss of productivity and reactive healthcare costs. And with the pressure on HR to cut costs, now is the time to take a proactive approach and look at smart ways to reduce sickness absence.

We ran a recent poll which found just 21 per cent of HR professionals know the cost of staff absence in their organisation. The organisations that do record sickness absence tend to record different things, some simply focusing on the basic cost and others including the cost of staff turnover etc.

The fact of the matter is that the true cost of sickness absence is often much higher than organisations first anticipate. We know, for an organisation with 750 staff sickness absence costs around £2,745,600, when taking into account pay, staff turnover and reactive healthcare costs.

To find out the cost of sickness absence in your organisation, click here to use our free calculator   

 

Whilst some organisations do routinely monitor sickness absence, when it comes to managing absence, current approaches tend to be quite reactive. This means there is already a problem and business finances and productivity is often suffering as a result.

To really reduce the negative impact attached to sickness absence employers need to take a proactive approach to the health and wellbeing of their staff. In practice, what this means is influencing employees to be much healthier and helping them to put in place good habits.

This will improve the health of employees so that they are less likely to need to take time off work because they are sick and any reactive health costs will reduce as a result. But get it right and it will also ensure they turn up to work more engaged and motivated.

Click here to listen to our recent webinar focusing on Why your business must be energised in 2013 and how to achieve this?