The Issue:

Relatively high staff absence levels in a public sector organisation placing increasing pressure on teams and managers. 

• Others were being asked to cover workload of absentees and vacant posts which meant they were doing work for which they didn't necessarily have skills or time to perform effectively.   
• This led to a problem cycle - with people remaining in team stressed and taking more sick leave themselves, in effect a sicknote culture.
• Expense was involved in recruiting and retraining new staff to rebuild teams. 
• Management felt frustrated and under pressure dealing with staff motivation and not business development. Constant fire-fighting is detrimental to any business.

Our Solution:

We were asked to work with one key team for whom absence was a particular issue, and assessed a number of key areas:

• Individual managers were asked to identify causes of absenteeism in this specific group, without making causal assumptions.
• We highlighted several key problems including: workload, work load distribution across teams, ambiguous management messages.
• Small stresses being blown out of proportion formed a large part of work stress and for some staff, problems at home were impacting on work performance.
• Staff had a series of seminars separated from day to day operational communication which included:
  
      - What you can change and what you can't influence.
      - Managing day-to-day challenges and problems.
      - Understanding different individuals' perspectives.
      - Understanding ourselves using a thought-behaviour map
      - Identifying performance-enabling and performance-inhibiting thoughts and behaviours

Managers were given one to one resilience coaching over a 3-month period 
   

The Outcome:

Managers were handed the tools to deal with the absenteeism issues.

• This put them back in control and thus lessened their own stress leaving them better able to tackle the individual agenda's of the staff.
• A more open attitude encouraged staff to discuss issues rather than just taking sick leave.
• A generally more controlled but sympathetic arena allowed both staff and management to cut down on previously unacceptable levels of absenteeism.