HR Industry News

Fewer days off sick for manufacturing workers

— 18 May 2007 —

Workers in the manufacturing sector now take, on average, less than seven days off sick each year.

That’s the finding of new research carried out by employers’ group the EEF in a survey covering more than 120,000 employees.

On average, 6.7 days per employee were lost to sickness last year – down from 7.1 days in 2005.

EEF chief medical adviser Dr Sayeed Khan is reported as saying that manufacturers who invest in training for their staff are continuing to reap the benefits of a proactive approach to absence management.

Employers who invest to save or regain lost time and increase productivity always yield a positive ROI. Persuading finance teams to do this initially and gain accurate measurements are the real challenges.

Paul Avis, Corporate
Development Manager, Ceridian

However, there remains considerable room for improvement when it comes to reducing the number of companies who still see such training as a cost, he warned.

The research also found that four in 10 employees had no sick absence during 2006, a small improvement on the previous year’s figure.

Manual employees once again showed a higher absence rate than non-manual employees and just over a fifth of companies reported seeing an increase in short-term sickness absence. This compared with more than a third of firms seeing an increase in long-term sickness absence.

Paul Avis from Ceridian comments, “The manual/non-manual statistic may not be as simple as it appears. I have met with organisations whose biggest problem is white collar workers failing to report or under-reporting absence, whereas in a production-oriented environment, where time and motion assessments are common, reporting tends to be higher. This is why more absence is being generated.”

The South East of England and Greater London showed the lowest absence rate, with just 2.6 per cent of working days lost to sickness absence. 

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