Why bother with rehabilitation?
The aims of rehabilitation measures are:
- to avoid unnecessary sickness absence, ill-health, early retirements and dismissals on grounds of capability, none of which are in either the interest of you, the employer, or your employees;
- to help your employee work (or, if absent, return to work) at his or her highest skill/ability level and do so quickly; and
- to help employees retain or regain their confidence, motivation and relationship with their co-workers and manager.
Most businesses will have short-term sickness absence (self-certificated) and long-term absence (doctor certificated) where short-term absences account for roughly 80 percent of the spells or episodes of absence, but long-term absences account for about 80 percent of the days lost due to absence.
Combating long-term absence
Therefore, it is the long-term sickness absences that usually has the greatest financial cost to your business, even if one only takes into account the direct costs (wage, NI contributions, etc.) without even looking at the indirect costs (overtime or agency cover, extra work for co-workers in the department, etc.).
Furthermore, the longer someone is off the less likely they are to return to work successfully: at six months’ sickness absence you only have about a 50 percent chance of returning to work irrespective of the nature of your medical problem.
The window of opportunity for a high success rate for rehabilitation is around 4–6 weeks of absence. Any interventions that will allow an employee to begin rehabilitation around this 4–6 week window is worth pursuing, even if it means just keeping in contact with the employee or just getting the employee to visit the workplace ‘for a cup of tea’.
Rehabilitation is about reducing unnecessary sickness absence and helping employees retain or regain their confidence, motivation and relationship with their co-workers and manager.
For more information see EEF's award winning Managing Sickness Absence