There’s no hiding the fact that the UK has a workforce which is getting older and sicker. Already, around 25 per cent have a long-standing health condition which affects their ability to work, and the next twenty years will bring increases in obesity, diabetes, musculoskeletal disorders and mental health problems. The consequences are far-reaching for both individuals and for our economy. More of us will need to work beyond normal retirement age, but won’t be fit enough to do so, and the competitiveness of the UK economy depends largely on having a dynamic, highly-skilled, engaged and healthy workforce. Dame Carol Black has estimated that the annual cost of poor health in our workforce is about £100bn – equivalent to the GDP of Portugal. So, workforce health is a serious matter, as most would agree.
But do most British employers agree? In fact, many could be accused of casual indifference. Most efforts around ’wellbeing’ at work seem to be more about token gestures to make them look good rather than securing a tangible difference to the health of their employees. Let me explain.
Most employers recognise that sickness absence from work can be costly and disruptive and that healthier employees have fewer days off. At its most fundamental, there are two approaches to managing the problem of sickness absence. The first revolves around treating the symptoms. This results in the sensible application of attendance management policies and practices which dictate when and how absences should be reported, that return to work interviews should be conducted and when absence ’trigger’ points have been hit. In some organisations, health and wellbeing ’strategies’ may be introduced to encourage staff to eat healthily, to take exercise or to quit smoking – addressing lifestyle issues among employees who want to make changes to their health.
But giving staff subsidised gym membership or more lettuce in the canteen will not make enough difference to absence, nor are such steps strategic. If anything, they fall into the category of staff benefits – aimed at keeping the employer brand competitive. So the second approach is to focus on the underlying causes of absence. This is more complicated but has more impact. This approach includes how work is organised, how jobs are designed and how people are managed at work. Each of these factors is more about the fabric of organisational culture, the style of management being adopted or the climate of employee relations.
The research demonstrates that there are both financial and operational benefits to having a healthy workforce with lower than average sickness absence levels. Organisations which are best able to realise these benefits are those that measure and monitor absence levels to spot trends over time and across the organisation to prioritise ’hot-spots’, calculate and track the costs of sickness absence, quantifying indirect costs, have clear attendance management policies and procedures, which stress the role of employees and line managers and have access to responsive occupational health services which can intervene early in complex cases of long-term absence.
Forward-looking firms also adopt simple but targeted workplace health promotion practices to improve employee awareness of health and lifestyle issues through education, information and involvement, evaluate the impact of interventions and measure not just ’take-up’ but the impact of these initiatives on absence levels and other problems initiatives aim to address.
Most efforts around ’wellbeing’ at work seem to be more about token gestures to make them look good rather than securing a tangible difference to the health of their employees
They also recognise through action that sickness absence is lower among highly motivated, engaged and well-managed employees in good quality jobs with high levels of control and discretion; and they invest in the development of line manager capability which recognises that poor leadership and management have a number of consequences including impaired performance, low staff engagement, lower staff retention and high sickness absence.
A survey by Buck Consultants last year showed, optimistically, that half of employers say they have a fully or partly implemented wellness strategy. Yet the most frequently used wellbeing intervention used by these employers was subsidised gym membership and only 11 per cent of employers have measured the financial impact of their wellness practices. Most worryingly, there is no data on how many measure whether their interventions actually improve health. All this makes me sceptical about how strategic these wellness programmes really are. Too many are as flimsy as the lettuce leaves on which they seem to rely.