News from Professor Dame Carol Black

Always interesting, Professor Dame Carol Black was addressing a group of HR professionals yesterday on the topics of absence, well-being and engagement. Dame Carol has been involved in researching and policy making in the sector since 2005 and a lot has happened during her time. Yesterday she took the audience through the journey briefly to paint the full picture of where we are today. Dame Carol made many very poignant and interesting points and I’ve picked out just a few of them to share here.

What causes absence and incapacity to work?

Absence is, for the main part, not caused by disease but by other inter-related problems, which need non-medical interventions. 77% of GPs admit to feeling obliged to write a sick note for non-medical reasons for patients who are struggling with what Dame Carol quite simply called ‘life’. The main problem may be, for example, relationships at work or outside work, financial problems, caring responsibilities, other commitments, job insecurity or any combination of the above. In many cases the individuals suffer from ‘never going back to that job’ syndrome where they might be quite happy to work but just not under that boss or not in that company.

The current culture results in an individual easily being signed off work and very easily slipping away further and further from the labour market. The chances of bringing a person back to work reduce with time and after 20 weeks the likelihood of return has fallen to just 15%. When the Work Capability Assessment comes around, the person has usually been out of work around 48 weeks and if the outcome of this assessment is that they are capable to work, returning the person to active employment becomes a great challenge. Dame Carol’s suggestion to the government has been to introduce a job brokering service that acknowledges the real nature of the problem in each case and, where appropriate, helps employees re-deploy to a different job early on rather than letting them disappear into the myriad of benefits.

The single most important factor to well-being at work is management

Dame Carol recommended that if you only have a small budget to invest in employee well-being or engagement, spend it on management training. The importance of a line manager to an employee’s engagement and commitment to their job is hugely affected by the management styles. In a study that looked into the preconditions that decrease likelihood of back pain (until 2010 the main cause of absence in the UK according to CIPD studies), after the usual demographics factors had been accounted for, identified three main drivers in the workplace:

Feeling of control
Empowering leadership
Fair leadership

This goes to show how important it is that employees feel empowered and in control of what they do at work. It also underlines the importance management have to ensuring that employees remain at work and remain productive.

Occupational Health is too old fashioned for the 21^st century

Occupational Health needs to move forward to meet the needs of business today. UK is no longer an industrial country and so OH should stop concentrating on risks and reactive interventions. OH as a specialty needs to broaden its focus toward proactive measures and to tackling mental health issues. Resilience programs should become a key part of the remit and the service should be tailored to the needs of the employers and employees rather than offering the same products to all clients. This year’s intake of new trainees into the OH profession only filled half of the places and so the discipline must modernise also to attract new practitioners.

Lack of data still prevalent

Dame Carol touched upon the issue Honeydew tackle with every day: lack of data and visibility about the extent of the absence problem. Most companies still don’t accurately record sickness absence or its drivers. Most companies don’t recognise the cost of absence to the business and without accurate data, it’s not even possible to estimate the cost.

Finally, Dame Carol mentioned that small and medium-sized companies, which make up the majority of UK plc, pose the biggest challenge because they have fewer resources to put in place well-being strategies or absence interventions. This is a challenge Honeydew has quite happily taken on board with part of our service offering tailored specifically to the SME market. Bring it on!