Although a healthy 85% of UK businesses record employee absence, according to research undertaken on behalf of GRiD, fewer employers (63%) actually measure the impact of sickness absence on their business.

Of these, four in five said that it had become more difficult to record since the onset of Covid-19 as furloughing and working from home have both masked sickness absence.

While it is important to accurately quantify staff absences, the industry body for the group risk protection sector believes that, recording the impact is of equal importance in order to be able to present the case for employee benefits that support both the individual and the business during time away from work.

Of those businesses who do understand the benefits of documenting the impact of staff sickness, recording the number of lost hours or days was the favoured method (44%), followed by calculating the cost of sick pay provision – e.g. Statutory Sick Pay and salary costs (40%). Other practices included analysing the cost of lost productivity (36%), analysing direct costs such as for temporary staff and agency fees (33%), and indirect costs – such as colleagues covering work, learning time, management time (33%).

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