Recent statistics show that the UK loses 131 million days a year to sickness in the workforce. The main reason for this absenteeism is minor illness – such as back, neck and muscle pain.
This all adds up to unnecessary expense for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Writing for Management Today, Caroline Wood, founder of HR Heroes, reveals her strategy for dealing with this type of regular but questionable absence: she retaliates with excessive administration.
Woods comments: “There’s no doubt that if you put in place a host of excruciatingly dull administrative procedures and processes, you’ll find they will never want to take another day off.”
Expanding on her strategy, Wood highlights three specific things you can do to reduce the days off sick taken by your employees:
1) Build clearly stated trigger points into your sickness policy. “For example,” explains Wood, “it’s perfectly reasonable to say that if an employee has three instances of absence due to illness in a rolling three-month period, this will trigger a meeting to discuss what’s been wrong and if there are any underlying problems.”
2) Whenever one of your employees is ill, be absolutely rigorous and insist they provide you with the appropriate paperwork from a healthcare professional or a written explanation for their absence.
3) When a member of staff returns to work, hold a back-to-work interview.