It has already been well debated that looking after employee well being can really boost productivity. And in these tough economic times there are daily reports of how employees are feeling concerned about losing their jobs, facing financial challenges and not feeling their most positive – leaving them talking of depression and stress, and it’s all completely understandable. So what can you do to help?
The HSE has published figures that show the UK lost 34 million working days through sick absence in 2007/2008, an average of 1.4 days per employee, if you said that you worked in an organisation with 100 employees that’s an average 140 days per year lost productivity!! To put that further into context, that’s over 50% of one full time employee’s working days in a year!
When it’s broken down like this it’s not hard to see the value in ensuring and supporting your employee’s well being, ask you self what you could do with another 140 days of productivity?!
So what can you do to support and promote employee well being – that’s not going to devalue the gain of 140 days more productivity – here are some of our ideas:
- Implement a Sick absence Management policy that includes return to work interviews
- Invite a local GP or other knowledgeable professional such as nutritionist, into your organisation to talk about the importance of looking after yourself and how and the benefits for employees
- Run an internally generated poster campaign on well being- include healthy eating, need for sleep, how to recognise stress symptoms and who to talk to if they have any problems
- Encourage employees to take proper breaks and use annual leave – refreshed and energized employees are more productive
- Encourage staff to be sociable – promote internal interest groups/activities
- Empower staff – staff who are in control of aspects of their work will feel calmer and more resilient when dealing with the changing priorities.
Some ideas that require some spending but you can decide the amount:
- Fresh Fruit – provide staff with fresh fruit, daily, weekly once a month the choice is yours
- Provide an Employee Assistance Program – these can provide advice and counselling on stress, personal problems, financial worries and a whole host of other issues which maybe affecting your employees
- Stress Management/Health and Well being training/seminars
- Equip your managers to recognise the signs of stress and those employees who are struggling generally and just as importantly how to help and support them
- Subsidise employee sports and social – empower them to run it give them the budget.
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Photo credit: sakurako Kitsa
Article by Hayley Oats
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
The number of days lost to absence is over 170million days per year, according to the CBI-Axa survey.
The HSE figure refers to days lost to absence caused or made worse by work, which is only a proportion of the total. You may wish to update your calculations.
Thanks for the additional information on this, Matt.
We took the conservative approach for purposes of this post, on the basis that this was the proportion that companies could affect directly. As you have highlighted there are a number of absence surveys out there, and we took the active decision to use the HSE as respected source of data. However, as you point out, the total cost due to absence is far higher than that attributed to work-causes alone. It’s definitely a major cost factor for business in the UK.