How to Minimize Employee Sick Day Use

An empty office bringing you down?

Workplace absence costs the U.S. economy many billions of dollars each year. While it may appear that there is limited scope for managing the sickness levels of your workforce, the reality is that you can take many steps to successfully minimize staff sickness absence. A popular catchphrase for tackling these problems is to make sure that workers are "happy, healthy, and here."

Instructions

1. Make sure that the human resource management systems in place are robust. Successful sick day management is almost always predicated on good data and so you need to make sure that there are systems in place to obtain timely and accurate information.

2. Make sure that there are set and agreed procedures in place as well as triggers for action. If there are no clear guidelines in place for employees as to when they should report sickness, how often contact should be maintained, and the length of absenteeism that would prompt further action, it will be almost impossible to successfully manage such absences and prevent excessive use of sick days.

3. Train line managers how to deal with constant sick leave absence. This not only involves a broad knowledge of the procedures as detailed above but also in the skills necessary to handle "return to work" interviews and dealing with arrangements for individuals sensitively.

4. The fourth step is to determine whether morale is the issue for the staff being absent. Team-building exercises or other morale-boosting activities can significantly reduce sickness absence, particularly in larger organizations. Wider health promotion initiatives such as diet control and alcohol and smoking cessation, will also help.

5. Finally, a useful step to reduce absence is to offer flexible, "family friendly" employee assistance programs to be sympathetic to those employees with children or other care responsibilities. These might include such initiatives as job-sharing or shift swaps.