Addressing absence: Diagnosing the causes
Mental health: Open plan to tackle stress
Government initiatives: Fit notes not best medicine
Workplace culture: Healthy offensive
Older workforce: New plans in older era
Sponsor’s comment: In fitness and in health
Editor’s comment
Sickness absence can be a costly business for employers. Although a certain degree of absence is inevitable in any organisation, there are steps employers can take to reduce the likelihood of an absence occurring, or, when an employee does go off sick, help them to return to work as soon as possible.
But uncovering the real reason behind an employee’s absence may not always be straightforward. Those suffering from mental ill-health, for example, may not be willing to admit this to their employer because of the stigma often attached to such problems. So, taking a proactive approach to staff wellbeing and creating an open workplace culture can help reduce sickness absence levels.
To delve further into sickness absence issues, we assembled a panel of HR and reward professionals from a range of sectors, along with leading experts in employee health and wellbeing, at the Employee Benefits/Cigna HealthCare Roundtable.
During the discussion, our panel of 10 experts (pictured below), all of whom have differing experiences of, and expertise in, sickness absence, covered a wide range of topics, including how best to manage absence, mental health issues, the impact of government initiatives and legislation such as the removal of the default retirement
age, and how to head off problems before they occur.
We also filmed part of the discussion which will be available online shortly.
Debbie Lovewell
Deputy Editor, Employee Benefits