/ 28 August 2008

Treating a sick-note epidemic

One Wednesday morning last month, BBC News led with a statement by the UK health secretary Alan Johnson, who wanted doctors to take a lead in tackling ”sick-note culture”, to address the 175 million working days lost in the United Kingdom to sickness each year at a cost of £13-billion.

The second story concerned a data disc containing DNA profiles that lay for a year on the desk of an official on sick leave.

Absence through sickness is near the top of the agenda in the public sector, where the taxpayer foots the bill.

What better place to visit, than the HQ of a government agency so unwell that last November House of Commons public accounts committee chairman Edward Leigh remarked ”sick leave seems to be a way of life. On average, each employee is off sick for nearly three weeks each year. The fact that [the agency seems] to function adequately despite this amazingly high rate of absence is a matter for surprise, to say the least.”

Swansea, south Wales is home to the UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA). Here family doctors commiserate, ”You poor sod,” when signing a DVLA employee off sick, according to David Evans, the agency’s director of central operations.

The agency is a data collecting and processing factory, and staffed by mostly young women.

”It’s a well known fact that, with women problems, health and caring factors too, high levels of female staff contribute to a higher level of absence through sickness,” says human resources director Avril Beynon.

So what can you do? ”There is no magic bullet,” says David Evans, but the DVLA directorate believes improvements in attendance can flow from good management.

The problem, according to retired manager Jack Fell, is that ”extremely tedious, target-led work at lower levels” was being supervised ”on an old-fashioned factory basis. Even at higher management levels, a lot of staff felt unheard and disenfranchised.”

He describes a common scenario where a member of staff suffering a bad back would take more days off than necessary.

It’s a picture corroborated by a former agent in the call centre — ”my manager told me she wasn’t prepared to change my hours because then she’d have to change them for everyone”.

Though absenteeism through sickness has sat at the top of the DVLA’s agenda, only in the last seven years was a long term strategy set in motion by a new chief executive, Clive Bennett. He began by bringing in the private sector to upgrade buildings and technical infrastructure.

Parts of the estate remain institutional, but most staff now work in a more congenial environment. Bennett’s successor as chief executive Noel Shanahan is now focused on the agency’s practices and processes.

”In some parts of the business we have very good sickness rates, better even than in the private sector,” he says. ”They’re often our local offices round the country with a small number of staff and very close management.

”Staff there are motivated not to throw casual sickies; they’ll let their pals down because others will have to carry their workload.

”And in Swansea managers know to have a laugh with their teams about not overdoing it on the weekend. We’re helping our managers understand how that relationship and motivation works.”

Flexible working, the team ethic, close management, promoting today’s DVLA to local GPs to address prejudice based on a grimmer past and promoting a healthy lifestyle, are the main tools the DVLA believes will erode its sick-note culture.

So much for the carrots: the stick is that, with the support of employees, the numbers of DVLA staff sacked for poor attendance will be publicised; last year it was 42. One person’s humane and caring workplace is another’s gullible and politically correct shelter for shirkers. —