I have an employee who is always off sick! Help!!
Transcript to video
This is one of the biggest issues that we have to resolve for our clients! Recent stats suggest that sickness absence costs UK businesses on average 5.6 days per year per employee.
Many Small medium size businesses have a real struggle when one of their team is continually off work sick and this can cause significant problems for your business.
Business owners often believe that it is impossible to do anything and that the law is on the employees’ side, leaving them with the problem being ignored and putting them off recruiting staff to expand their business.
The belief that you can’t manage sickness absence is simply not true. Although it isn’t that straight forward and good HR advice is critical to manage it effectively.
Prevention is the most important 1st step to removing this issue. A safe working environment, a positive, open and supportive culture and effective communication are all methods to help you do this. In addition, clear sickness absence policies and procedures consistently followed by the company helps to manage expectation and reduce overall absence.
Unfortunately, people do genuinely get sick! And we need to accept that as an employer this will happen from time to time and it is your duty to support the individual to the best of your ability in order to facilitate a return to work as soon as it is practical.
You do however have people that will take advantage. For that reason it is important to be clear on what your approach to managing absence is. Managed through effectively you can reduce the level of sickness absence and fairly terminate the employment of those individuals who regularly take advantage whilst supporting those individuals that genuinely need it.
It is not impossible; you just need help to manage the issue. If you want our help please give us a call for your free consultation.
