CIPD 2012 Absence Survey published

Honeydew team headed to the launch event yesterday morning to hear all about this year’s absence survey results from CIPD and listen to a group of expert speakers outline the key trends in absence management. The main news is that absence overall is down from last year (6.8 days in 2012 vs 7.7 in 2011) – and the lowest ever (7.9 days) in the public sector!

The event focus was on presenteeism with Cary Cooper and Dr Jill Miller reminding that the lower figures may, in fact, be hiding a different type of issue where employees turn up at work ill because low job security in the current economic climate. With only a third of the respondents stating that they are not considering redundancies in the near future, this insecurity is well-founded. Absence is often used as a selection criterion in redundancies but, as we heard from employment lawyer Stephen Levinson, companies should be careful in how its weighting is calculated.

Nearly a third of companies had reported an increase in employees coming into work ill which supports the analysis that presenteeism is on the up. Cary Cooper also reminded us that studies have shown presenteeism actually costs employers more than absenteeism with lowered productivity, costly mistakes and even just the germs spreading across the workplace.

The reduction in absence days may not be as good a news as it sounds but what was positive was to hear that more companies now have a wellbeing strategy in place. Furthermore, companies who track the effectiveness of their wellbeing strategies were more likely than others to increase their wellbeing spend. This is good news because it shows that engagement initiatives do work and this just needs to be measured to prove the business case.

Finally, it’s important to remember that the same is true of this year’s report as previously: the sample size of 667 is comparatively low (number of UK private businesses alone is estimated at 4.5 million) and only very few of these represent SMEs which account for over 90% of UK businesses. We can also safely assume that the results show a fairly conservative result because companies that are truly struggling or have no idea what their absence levels are will not take the time to fill out the survey questionnaire. So the job’s definitely not done yet and especially with the increase in presenteeism we really need to focus on changing the culture rather than just cutting absence days.