Most employers that define long-term absence as lasting at least four weeks, will share responsibility for managing such absence between HR and the line manager, and will use case management on a selective basis, a survey by IRS and Xpert HR has found.
The poll of 173 employers on their management of long-term sickness absence found that such absence accounted for more than a third – 39% – of all time lost to absence last year.
Two-thirds of the employers polled defined long-term absence as four weeks, rising to more than eight in 10 in the public sector, although a tenth had no formal definition at all. This was most common among small to medium-sized enterprises.
The consensus on how to successfully manage long-term absence was not to let situations drift so that weeks go by with little or no contact between the employer and absent employee.
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This was, the review concluded, much less likely to happen where an organisation had developed a formal definition of long-term absence and linked it to an absence trigger.
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