Do you have any idea what absenteeism is costing your business? Probably not, as it’s the entrepreneurial companies, built on teamwork and trust, rather than hierarchical corporations, that think least about this problem. Returning to a survey done 10 years ago by MidlandHR, the absence management specialist FirstCare found a third of employers still don’t assess sickness costs and only one in 10 goes beyond simply measuring the wage bill.
In other words, they don’t take into account the impact on customer service and quality, the effect on productivity, or the increased workload for colleagues. Some 80% of the respondents agreed that line managers would be better at reporting sickness if they were provided with more accurate information about its impact on their departments.
Providing the tools
Tellingly, only 20% of respondents to the survey, ‘Absence Management – 10 Years On’, indicated that line managers have access to real-time data. “This can make life difficult for overstretched managers,” says Aaron Ross, FirstCare’s managing director. “Interpreting the impact of absence can also be difficult, in that managers often focus on the immediate consequences and fail to look at the implications that may arise when the employee returns to work. A desire to get back to business as usual can often override the need to conduct a formal discussion, and identify appropriate ways to help mitigate future absence.”
If you don’t know you have a problem, how can you deal with it? It’s not easy to translate the £600 per employee estimated as the direct cost of absence to UK business to the actual impact on productivity, agrees Fiona Robson, a lecturer in Organisation and Human Resource Management at NewcastleBusinessSchool. “For a small business with 30 staff, this means an average cost of more than £18,000 a year,” she says. “Most middle managers have access to the data they need, but often they can’t estimate the cost and don’t have the skills to handle absenteeism issues consistently.” This problem has become so acute that the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development commissioned Robson to produce a toolkit to help line managers reduce absence levels.
Illness, personal problems and stress are difficult to discuss, she concedes. “A lot of line managers are thrown into the role of having to look after absence in their team when it’s quite a specialised area,” she says. “I believe they need support to do it effectively. Although most organisations will say they have return-to-work interviews, often these are not carried out consistently, if at all. I encourage organisations to have monitoring in place so employees know what to expect. It is also about professionalising the role of the line manager. If we are saying attendance is an important part of their role, that needs to be in the job description, not treated as a bit of admin tagged on to their core responsibilities.”
Call centre motivation
When asked to name an industry where casual and unplanned absence is likely to be a problem, most people would agree that call centres are a hard nut to crack. According to the Office of National Statistics, call centre agents are twice as likely to take time off as other employees. However, Granby Marketing Services, an outsourced call centre based in Blackburn, has an extremely low staff turnover rate and a constantly high level of attendance, according to its chief executive Stephen Bentley. He acquired the business from Omnicom Corporation in 2000 and, in five years, quadrupled its original £1.5m turnover.
Bentley has 19 years of experience in marketing, having owned a successful consultancy specialising in business turnarounds. He puts Granby’s success down to motivating his staff and placing the emphasis on career development, rather than casual employment. “We like to bring an element of entertainment into the work,” he says. “That doesn’t mean we don’t take our goals seriously, but I believe you can’t expect someone to sell any product or idea unless they’ve been given a chance to buy into it.”
Bentley understands the need to nurture a sense of common purpose in his workforce, but when it comes to absentee management, he has not forgotten the need to systematise best practice. Granby collects its data on employee attendance using the Bradford Factor, a system that rates the record of every individual. “It helps us pick up any behaviour patterns we ought to know about at an early stage,” he explains. “It’s an axiom that short and frequent absences are more disruptive
to the business than longer illnesses or planned breaks.
All of our measures aim at prevention rather than having to deal with a full-blown problem.”
Granby
is Investors-in-People accredited, unusual in that industry. “It’s something that is granted on the basis of the employees saying this is a good place to work rather than on anything I tell them,” he says. “We are proud of that.”
Work-life integration
Earlier this year I asked Kevin Roberts, the chief executive Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi, how he managed his work-life balance in view of the fact his home is in New Zealand, his office in New York, and that he travels so much that for 50% of the year he is at neither. He replied: “I don’t have work-life balance; I have work-life integration!” That’s the ultimate in flexi-time, and as people move away from fixed hours of work in a set location, it becomes harder to measure the extent of their engagement in one activity or the other. Productivity may then be expressed in terms of the value the individual adds to the organisation, and that will call for more sophisticated metrics than are available currently.
