Fostering an attendance culture
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Last updated: 22 June 2006
Fostering an attendance culture: A guide for APS agencies
Section 3: Impact of workplace absence
A certain level of workplace absence is to be expected and can be beneficial for an organisation. Attending work when genuinely unwell is a health and safety issue for both the sick employee and others in the workforce.7 On the other hand, high rates of absence are costly and impact on individuals, business units and the organisation as a whole.
Excessive absences often coincide with poor performance, high turnover rates and low organisational commitment.8 Productivity gains and cost savings can be achieved by even a small reduction in absence.
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Workplace absence: What is it really costing your agency?
- Direct salary costs, compensation and lost productivity arising from workplace absence have a significant cost for the APS.10
- The overall direct salary cost arising from workplace absence across the APS is estimated to be $295 million.11
- The average cost of a worker’s compensation claim in 2005 was $28,424 and trending upwards.12
- Furthermore, it is estimated that the total costs of absence can be up to three times the direct costs of the salaries of the absent employee.13
Benchmarking absence rates in the APS
In 2003 the ANAO released the Absence Management in the Australian Public Service report. Despite the difficulty in collecting reliable and comparable APS wide statistics they were able to extrapolate, based on their study of approximately 75 agencies, that in 2001-02:
- 73% of absences were recorded as sick leave (equating to a median of 7.0 days per full time equivalent (FTE))
- the median absence rate was 8.9 days (compared to 6.8 days in the private sector)
- ranges for those APS agencies included in the data varied from 2.9 days per FTE up to 15.7 days per FTE.14
Research in Western Australia showed that typically there is a small number of employees that take a large amount of leave.15 Anecdotally, similar trends have been observed in APS agencies.
Recent agency consultations undertaken by the Commission found that:
- agencies vary in the extent to which they collect, record, analyse and report on absence data
- there are varying degrees to which agencies have problems with absence rates
- patterns of short term absence and long term absences were presenting significant challenges
- high rates across an agency may actually be a reflection of particular hot spots within the agency
- agencies with smaller teams, higher classification levels with roles that are more independent, and varied in nature, seem to have the lower rates of absence.
Traditionally, the public sector has reported higher absence figures than the private sector. One Australian study suggests that public sector employees are 1.6 times more likely to be absent than their private sector counterparts.16 Some claim that this is the product of an entitlement culture that has developed in the public sector as a result of generous leave provisions, a claim that appears to be supported by UK research, which highlights generous entitlements as one of the reasons for absences in the public sector.17
As such, benchmarking against the private sector should be undertaken with caution. Not only are there differences in how absence is defined, grouped and recorded but the APS also has a responsibility as a model employer. Additional leave provisions reflect family-friendly and work-life balance practices in the APS. A number of agencies also use leave provisions as part of their attraction and retention strategies or to promote themselves as an employer of choice.
What is an acceptable level of absence?
The diversity and nature of APS work means that there is no optimum or standard level of acceptable workplace absence that is applicable service-wide. Agencies are best placed to determine when workplace absence rates require further investigation and management. If agencies think there is a problem, it is worth investigating.
Rather than relying on a single aggregated workplace absence figure, it is important that agencies look for trends and patterns.
An acceptable average absence rate may mask ‘pockets’ or ‘hot spots’ in certain divisions, business units or individual teams within an agency.
To understand whether absence rates are having a negative impact or reflecting unhealthy aspects of the organisation, they should be viewed in the context of turnover rates, reasons for leaving an agency, staff satisfaction and usage of employee counselling programmes.
7 Australasian Faculty of Occupational Medicine, 1999, Workplace Attendance and Absenteeism, http://www.racp.edu.au/afom/absenteeism.pdf, p. 10 (AFOM, 1999)
8 Tarrant, D., 2005, ‘How to keep employees engaged’, in Management Today, vol 20, pp. 20-23
9 Adapted from AFOM, 1999, p. 10
10 See Australian National Audit Office, 2003, Absence Management in the Australian Public Service: Audit Report no.52 2002-2003, http://www.anao.gov.au and Comcare, 2005a, Annual Report 2004-2005, Comcare, Canberra
11 ANAO, 2003, p. 4
12 Comcare, 2005a, p. 10
13 ANAO, 2003, p. 4
14 ANAO, 2003, p. 34. This includes leave taken for sick leave, compensation, industrial disputes and miscellaneous reasons such as carers, family, personal bereavement and other special leave.
15 Auditor General Western Australia, 1997, Get Better Soon: The Management of Sickness Absence in the WA Public Sector, http://www.audit.wa.gov.au/reports/report97_05.html, p.2. The report found that 15% of all sick leave was taken by only one percent of the state government workforce.
16 Vandeheuval, 1994 in Ministry of the Premier and Cabinet, 2001, Absent Friends: Understanding Sickness Absence in the Western Australian Public Sector, http://www.dpc.wa.gov.au/psmd/pubs/wac/absentfriends/sickabprint.pdf, p. 5
17 Dibben, P., James, P. & Cunningham, I. 2001,‘Absence management in the public sector: An integrative model?, Public Money & Management, October-December, pp. 55-60. Lower job satisfaction, greater job security and less demanding performance standards were also cited as reasons.
