A Critical Analysis of Absence Management in the Public Sector Organisation

According to the 2007 Absence Management Report produced by CIPD, absenteeism is a growing problem in all organisations with absence rates and the costs incurred by employers on the increase. In today's challenging economic conditions, organisations will seek to streamline their costs and employee attendance is therefore increasingly on the agenda. It is widely recognised that employee absenteeism has an impact on the bottom line, competitiveness and the quality of services provided by organisations. It is also becoming more apparent that absenteeism is no longer a control issue concerned with number crunching, but has roots in the psychology and sociology of organisations and their people. More and more employers are seeking to address the causes of absenteeism and be proactive in managing this most contentious of issues rather than imposing sanctions with little regard to the reasons why their employees are absent. Employee welfare and wellbeing is now seen as a key element of managing attendance. The subject of managing attendance and employee absenteeism has enormous scope for research. Whilst there has been considerable research into the area it is clear that there is no generic approach to managing attendance and what works in one organisation may not necessarily work in another. As with any people management intervention, there are many variables which can influence the outcomes of the process which makes the subject a fascinating yet daunting topic to research. For the purposes of this research, one organisation has been critically evaluated in terms of its approach to absence management. A combination of attitudes, opinions and thoughts on the subject of attendance management, as well as numerical, 'harder' data have been collected an analysed to establish current practice. The organisation has also been benchmarked against organisations in Ireland and the United Kingdom through secondary research in order to establish current performance and areas of improvement. It is acknowledged that the subject of absenteeism is vast and for this reason, the research was focussed on the costs and causes of employee absence and the potential remedies to an absence problem. Whilst it would have been preferred to analyse the subject from an employee engagement and commitment angle, it was recognised that carrying out research and collecting data would have been extremely challenging. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to review current theory and practice in the area of employee absence and to evaluate the absence management situation in a particular organisation, in this case, a public sector organisation operating in the health sector. As a result of the review of literature and analysis of data collected, it is the primary objective of this work to benchmark where the organisation is at the present time and to propose how the current practice can be enhanced by the introduction of relevant absence management initiatives