Agenda item - Annual Sickness Absence Performance Update 2015/16

Agenda item

Annual Sickness Absence Performance Update 2015/16

Minutes:

The Head of Business Transformation and Organisational Development and the Human Resources and Development Manager presented an update on the sickness absence statistics for Council staff covering the period April 2015 to March 2016.  During the delivery of this update the following points were highlighted for Members’ consideration:

 

·                An average of 5.33 days per full time equivalent (FTE) post had been lost due to sickness absence by Bromsgrove staff during the period.

·                There had been a decrease in the proportion of days lost due to short-term sickness.

·                The Council had worked hard, alongside Redditch Borough Council, to support staff experiencing stress, anxiety and depression.

·                Action to support people experiencing difficulties with stress had included the Time to Talk initiative, provision of counselling services and use of the Employee Assistance programme.

·                The Council’s process for reporting sickness absence was the subject of an ongoing review and a new approach had been trialled in a small number of departments.

·                In the trial managers were able to report staff sickness absences directly to the Human Resources team, rather than through Payroll.

·                A key finding of the trial had been that the Council’s existing Sickness Absence Policy was not supporting managers adequately.

·                The trial was due to be extended to other departments over the following months.

·                The data arising from the trial would be published on the dashboard and used to help managers to monitor and manage sickness absence levels within their teams more effectively.

 

Following the presentation a number of points were discussed by Members in further detail:

 

·                The causes of stress and action taken by the Council to identify and address this problem.  Members were advised that managers were being provided with training to enable them to identify behaviour which might indicate that a member of staff was suffering from stress.

·                The inclusion of statistics for staff employed in Housing, which was solely a Redditch service area.

·                The potential for further data to be obtained from the online Employee Assistance programme in order to appreciate the key sources of information required by staff.

·                The value of recent initiatives tackling problems with stress in the work place and the extent to which this had helped to address the social stigma associated with mental health difficulties.

·                The number of staff absent due to sickness and the size of the teams within which they worked.

·                The inclusion of sickness absence statistics for services hosted by Bromsgrove District Council and the extent to which this accurately reflected absences for the local authority in a shared service working environment.

·                The potential to reflect sickness absence statistics more accurately for the Council by calculating the proportion of absences in accordance with the division of funding between Councils to support those services.

·                The prevalence of musculo-skeletal illnesses within the Environmental Services team as a cause for sickness absence and access within the team to Occupational Health services.

·                The level of contact that the Council had with GP practices in cases where managers had concerns about the health of members of staff.

·                The potential for comparative figures to be provided for sickness absence levels in previous years.

·                The extent to which staff may feel reluctant to explain the causes of stress as it was often considered to be a private and highly sensitive matter.

·                The possibility of providing greater clarification in the reports about the causes of stress (e.g. to determine whether this was due to personal issues or working conditions).  Concerns were expressed that if additional information was provided on this subject it would need to be presented in an appropriate manner so as to not compromise staff confidentiality.

·                The potential for the Board to receive further information about the findings of the review and to scrutinise the Sickness Absence Policy in the event that any amendments were made to this document in response to the trial outcomes.

 

At the end of these discussions it was

 

RESOLVED that

 

(1)       The following amendments should be made to future editions of the Sickness Absence Update report;

(a)  comparative data should be included in the report;

(b)  specific information should be provided about absence levels amongst staff delivering services in Bromsgrove district and references to Redditch only services should be removed from future editions of the report;

(c)  departmental head counts should be provided; and

(d)  subject to addressing concerns detailed in the preamble above, greater clarification should be provided about the causes of sickness absence due to stress.

(2)       A Sickness Absence Update report be presented to the Board in six months’ time.

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