Re-evaluating your sickness policy for 2024

Why you should be re-evaluating your sickness policy in 2024

Over the past few years, the subject of physical health and sickness has risen up the corporate priority list. The key impetus for this change is, of course, the global pandemic, which caused a wave of illness across the world, and forced businesses to instil new and evolving strategies in order to survive. However, whilst the pandemic may seem like a lifetime ago, health and wellbeing is still hugely in a state of flux.

According to recent CIPD data, the average rate of employee absence now stands at 7.8 days per employee per year, this is a considerable increase since the CIPD last reported this from data collected before the pandemic in October/November 2019, at 5.8 days per employee. Increasingly worrying for some industries is that in the public sector, the rate of sickness jumps to 10.6 per employee.

In addition, Access PeopleHR gathered the data of absences recorded from over 2,000 small and medium-sized businesses to track sickness leave. Nationally, the report revealed that there’s been an increase of 45% in sickness absence rates since 2019. Each business recorded an average of 133 sick leave days - up 30% compared to previous years.

Why is sickness rising so significantly across the board?

In short, worker health is still vastly affected by a range of different impetus. According to new survey findings from Simplyhealth, stress was found to be the most significant factor for both short and long-term absence. Over 76% of respondents to the research reported stress-related absence in their organisation in the past year. Heavy workloads remain by far the most common cause of stress-related absence at 67%, followed by management style at 37%.