Improving access to occupational health services alone will not solve the UK’s long-term sickness crisis. Employers need a better grasp of what their people data tells them, writes Alun Baker.
Earlier this year, a new record was set for the number of people in the UK not working due to long-term sickness. ONS figures showed that for every 13 people working, one was on long-term leave due to illness. Altogether, nearly half a million more people are out of the workforce due to ill-health than before the pandemic.
This steep rise in absence is having a marked effect on the UK economy, with many businesses facing difficult choices as a result of their reduced workforce.
In response, the government has said it hopes to tackle the long-term sickness issue with proposed new measures, which focus on driving increased access to occupational health services amongst other things. This is a laudable effort, but arguably the changes won’t do enough to address the root causes of the problems we’re seeing.
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One major issue is that current occupational health support mechanisms simply aren’t fit to meet the needs of the modern workforce. As a discipline, occupational health was developed in the 1970s, primarily for an industrial workforce to protect workers in the event of accidents. Today’s employee needs are much more diverse, including an increasingly remote workforce, an increase in mental health issues, and wider societal issues of isolation and burnout.
In short, there are more effective solutions available to address employee long-term sickness, particularly where the use of improved data collection and analysis can be harnessed to drive early prevention of potential health issues. Rather than just increasing access to their available services, employers can also use an intelligent, data-driven approach to analyse areas of risk, identify where action is needed, and crucially, provide assistance before a serious health issue sets in.
Prevention is preferable to treatment
It might sound simplistic, but prevention is always better than cure. It is better to help someone shorten the length of time they need to take off by providing prompt care and assistance, than to surrender to circumstances and focus on symptom management later when much of the damage is already done. There’s a reason the NHS spends millions on public information campaigns to get people to attend screening, after all.
To truly begin shifting the needle on the long-term sickness crisis, employers need to re-evaluate current support mechanisms and shift to a prevention-first culture – this is the best method for mitigating long-term absence.
This needs to start with a review of the current occupational health pipeline: how do people access occupational health services, and when? Typically, occupational health services are only offered after 20+ days of absence (the period of time that most organisations consider to be long-term sickness), so more often than not, the employee’s problem is already quite advanced at the point of treatment.
To truly begin shifting the needle on the long-term sickness crisis, employers need to re-evaluate current support mechanisms and shift to a prevention-first culture.”
In the worst cases, this culture can lead to complacency, with managers and employees alike viewing long-term sickness as all but unavoidable, and occupational health as a catch-all. Even in the best cases, it does nothing to reduce the overall instance rate; whatever is causing illness in the first place is left to roll on, while occupational health is expected to get people back on their feet as fast as possible. In the midst of a crisis, this approach can quickly lead to overbearing demand and reduced efficacy.
This ‘post-issue’ culture needs to be addressed if long-term sickness is to be reduced. HR leaders must consider how investment in time and resources can be redirected so that employees are supported before a problem takes root.
Focus on the data
One key way of doing this is to focus on achieving better data collection and analysis around employee health. Put simply, a more detailed understanding of what’s going on reduces the number of health blind spots and enables a targeted response to any patterns of absence. Embedding systems to collate, standardise, and visualise key employee health data can quickly result in a shift from firefighting to prevention.
For example, health data analysis can flag up teams that are expecting a higher-than-average instance of absences, indicating an investigation into work culture, management style, shift patterns and so on, to try and reduce occurrence. Similarly, data analysis can help flag up times of the year or regions of the business that regularly see higher rates of absence, enabling HR teams to proactively address drivers of stress or authorise flexibility measures where helpful. If a particular employee is showing the early warning signs of long-term absence – a growing rate of sick days week on week or month on month, for example – this should be the prompt to intervene and offer support.
These kinds of insights can lead to more intelligent, targeted policies, and are best complemented with access to professional healthcare advice or treatment as appropriate.
A people-centric approach
It’s important to state that improving organisational measurement of staff health metrics doesn’t mean taking a Big Brother-style approach. Employees should be fully aware of the information that’s being collected and how it’s used, and management decisions should always be made with a full grasp of the facts – not a knee-jerk reaction to the stats. The core goal is to improve working conditions for individuals and teams and provide access to appropriate healthcare services where needed.
Ultimately, if approached in this way, measuring staff health over the long term can improve processes, reduce days lost to illness, and most importantly, contribute to greater employee wellbeing and productivity.
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