Avoidable Absence  

Absenteeism is a cost of doing business, yet many organizations cannot even track it, and almost no one actually measures it.  This is especially troubling when you realize the cost goes well beyond the direct payouts for sick days and potential disability claims. Lost productivity from absent employees must also be considered, as well as the time invested by managers and human resources staff dealing with absent employees.  As a cost of doing business Absences need to be managed with a focus on reducing their impact.

Defining Avoidable Absence

How many days of absence are avoidable in your business every year?

Avoidable absences are defined as absences that were preventable or could have been shortened with more proactive policies, procedures and systems. In many organizations up to 25% of their absence days last year were avoidable.

Types of Avoidable Absence

To deal with avoidable absence, you must first be able to recognize it. There are two categories of avoidable absences:

  1. Absences that should not have happened in the first place:
    These absences include ailments or injuries that went untreated and eventually interfered with the employee’s ability to work, as well as absence abuses by employees due to ineffective policies and/or enforcement.
     
  2. Prolonged medical absences:
    Many medical absences last longer than necessary because the employer is not proactively involved in the absence management process. External attending physicians are unaware of the workplace and modified duty options and other return to work strategies with the employer that would allow employees to safely return to work sooner.  The importance of an early return is emphasized when you consider 50% of employees that miss 14 work days or more for a medical issue never return to work.  Early medical review can help build effective Return to Work plans support the employee and shorten their absence.

Contact Workplace Medical today to speak with a knowledgeable representative, and discover more about the causes and solutions for avoidable absences.


Causes of Avoidable Absence  

How avoidable absences happen

In order to find the right opportunities and solutions for avoiding absence, it’s important to first understand how and why they happen. It can be an incremental process that is hard to see when you are in the midst of it, so taking a step back to view the larger issues can be helpful.

There are two primary causes for avoidable absences:

1. Poor Absence Management Processes

Individual absences can easily leak across the thresholds of casual absence into short- and long-term disability claims. One employee’s absence is easy to miss in a busy day, and in the busy day after that, and soon you may lose track of how many days the employee has missed. By working with real-time data instead of historical information from payroll systems  you can seal some of the leaks in your absence management processes that are leading to absences that are avoidable.

2. Lack of Employer’s Perspective in the Medical Support for a Safe Return to Work

Many organizations think they have no role to play in the recovery and return to work of their employees, but they can do more than they realize.  An early Return-to-Work medical assessment, with or without the employee, can evaluate the functional abilities of the employee with a wider scope of return to work options, as well as a better understanding of the requirements of the employee’s job.  This medical assessment is strictly from a functional perspective, to shield the employer from the private medical information of the employee. It focuses on what matters to everyone: the safe return to work of the employee as soon as is possible.

Employers can help to reduce avoidable absences with a proactive approach to prevention, monitoring, intervention, and enforcement of effective absence management processes.

Learn about the comprehensive solutions Workplace Medical offers to effectively reduce the causes of avoidable absence in your organization.