Is your workplace culture driving up sickness absence?

It’s important to consider cultural issues, ranging from poor management to excessive workloads, as part of your sickness absence reduction plan.

One in two employees have called in sick to avoid a negative workplace culture, according to a recent poll by the CIPD.

Employees exposed to issues ranging from poor management to excessive workloads were not only more likely to have mental health issues, but also physical health issues.

Fortunately, the converse is true with measures put in place to boost culture going a long way towards reducing mental health sickness absence.

For expert insights on how to make culture part of your absence reduction plan, read on for our clinical team’s top three tips on how to create a culture where employees can thrive.

Three ways to boost workplace culture to reduce sickness absence

1. Identify how culture is impacting on sickness absence

Far too many organisations don’t relate culture to absence, when the reality is that how happy people are at work can and does impact on their health and wellbeing. If employees perceive their workload as being unmanageable, think they have an unsupportive manager or feel bullied by their colleagues, this will cause them to become stressed and eventually go absent.

Mental health counselling can help people with coping strategies, but unless the organisation addresses the underlying cultural factors the problem will seep into teams and more people will become affected. If five people out of a team of thirty have been off sick for stress in the past six months that’s a trigger to look at things. As are regular one-off absences.

Organisational stress risk assessments are a legal requirement, that can often be treated as a tick box exercise but done properly they can predict issues and protect employees from going sick. These should link back to the HSE’s management standards, which look at:

Demands – does the employee have a reasonable workload, work patterns and environment?
Control – does the employee have a say over how they work and chance to use their skills?
Support – is the employee supported by the organisation, managers and colleagues?
Relationships – are there positive relationships and ways to avoid unacceptable behaviour?
Role – does the employee understand their role and responsibilities?
Change – is change communicated effectively with processes for responding to concerns?

Employee listening, surveys, exit interviews and claims and absence data can also play a valuable role in forming a picture of how culture is impacting on employee wellbeing.

2. Train managers to create a positive workplace culture

Once you’ve formed a picture of the link between culture and absence, it’s important to look at the role of managers within this. Managers have a vital role to play in shaping the culture of the organisation and ensuring workloads are reasonable and unacceptable behaviour prevented. However, long gone are the days when people were promoted into management roles as a badge of honour, because they had the right credentials to lead people.

It’s therefore important that managers promoted into the role because of their technical abilities are trained how to support people and understand their role in contributing to workplace stress. As well as the importance of creating psychologically safe working environments, where people feel safe discussing any concerns with their manager.

Our most recent Health at Work report showed that just two thirds of employees feel comfortable discussing workload and deadline challenges with their manager, even though burnout is a major consequence of unhealthy working environments. Even less people feel comfortable discussing workplace relationships and equality and inclusion challenges.

By upskilling managers to manage the mental health of others and giving them the time to do this, you can dramatically reduce the number of people going absent. Fostering good relationships between employees and managers also boosts loyalty to the organisation. It’s the difference between someone referred into occupational health saying, “I don’t want to let my manager down’ instead of ‘I can’t face going back to work for my manager.’

3. Get senior leaders to proactively change the culture

The culture of the board, and senior leaders, will ultimately determine how things get done and therefore the behaviours within the business. If people are regularly pushing themselves past their limits, it will be because the culture of the organisation tells that that this is what’s required to get on, despite what HR and the wellbeing policies are saying.

Essential to delivering change is encouraging senior leaders to think about what culture the company needs to succeed. For example, if it wants to become more agile or innovative, it’s been repeatedly proven that people are more creative when they feel safe to try new things and make mistakes, than when they feel pressurised to get things right first time.

If the organisation has poor psychological safety and blame cultures, it will never achieve its goal to become more innovative and might make people sick by trying to do so. Therefore, leaders themselves will need to build the resilience and innovation of employees. Not least by giving people permission to learn from their mistakes so they can develop a growth mindset, instead of getting crumpled by setbacks.

Critical to success is also giving managers the time and resource needed to allow people to behave in the new ways required to deliver the desired culture change. Whether that’s encouraging employees to be more open about issues they’re struggling with or facilitating better working relationships. Only by taking this top-down approach can you create a culture that truly allows people to thrive.

Free webinar: Creating a culture to reduce mental health absence 10am, Tuesday 1 October 2024

Join our clinical team for expert insights on how to make culture creation part of your absence reduction strategy.

How can PAM Group help?

PAM Group can help you to create a culture that supports employees to stay healthy and thrive in the following ways:

Organisational Stress Risk Assessment: Our validated audit includes reviewing policies and procedures and support to anonymously survey employees, to identify a baseline measure of wellbeing culture and identify areas that could change for the better.

Business wellbeing action plan (BWAP): Bespoke consultancy and advice to help you to address any gaps in your wellbeing culture and policies, to create an actionable plan that will empower the business to elevate its approach to supporting mental health.

Manager Workshops: Online and in person manager training to help managers look after their own wellbeing and proactively support the mental health of employees. Includes training on how to identify people who are struggling and signpost to appropriate support.

Mental Health Support: We provide a full range of mental health support services, including an employee assistance programme (EAP), employee wellbeing app, return to work and rehabilitation programmes, counselling, CBT and EMDR therapies.

PAM OH Solutions: Seamless access to multi-disciplinary clinical teams who can assess employees and consult with managers to provide reasonable adjustments to prevent two-thirds of employees from going off sick, plus help to rehabilitate those already off work.

If you would like to discuss the role of culture change for reducing sickness absence across your organisation, please contact us to set up a free consultion via info@pamgroup.co.uk