Overview of situation

We were suffering with repetitive staff absences with regular patterns of behaviour. Despite identifying, we had no idea how to tackle. It was causing large amounts of disharmony within the team and starting to create a back-log of work.

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The problem they faced

The disharmony in the team and the build up of work was impacting our quality of service like a pincer movement. It came on very quickly and we had no mechanisms or capability to tackle or address the issue so it was only going to get worse for us.

 

What caused the problem

The 2 main causes of the problem were our lack of proactive management towards absences. Our managers have traditionally accepted it as part and parcel of staff behaviour which has been left to fester and become a significant issue for us. Once we realised it was a sizeable issue that needed addressing, we had no formal procedures in place to commence reversing the problem.

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Cost of the opportunity

Whilst we didn’t have company sick pay in staff contracts the loss of productivity was enormous. We then had to invest in additional resource i.e. temporary labour. Whilst, this was directly due to less staff being present, our KPIs also showed this was due to present staff also being less productive due to reduced engagement levels as well as less operational efficiency due to the reduced headcount onsite.

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The plan XYZ proposed

Bearman HR immediately came up with an absence management plan to reduce absence, quoting that they would be able to reduce it by half. They not only implemented an easy to use Bradford factor system, they also implemented various other tools and mechanisms designed to make absences more consistently accountable across the entire organisation.

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Results that followed

The results were instant; absences fell off a cliff. The quoted half reduction ended up being an extremely conservative estimate as our absences reducing from 9.4% to 1.7% within a 12-month period. Consequentially, our production efficiency sored as did our profits which means we are now looking at taking on more clients and are using Bearman HR to put those necessary people plans in place to achieve this.