Dundee City Council has reported a 19% reduction in the number of days lost due to staff ill health with a spokesman attributing the fall to the decision in June to enforce more stringent measures to cut down on sick days.
“Since the introduction of a new sickness absence policy there has been a marked improvement in attendance records across the city council,” the spokesman said.
“The new policy, which included shorter trigger times for formal interviews and medical assessments, has been widely communicated and rigorously implemented in all council departments.
“These early results are encouraging but there is still room for further improvement.”
The days lost fell from 75,326 in 2009/10 to 61,249 so far this year.
Rory Malone, Tayside regional officer for public sector union Unison, slammed the council’s “heartless” attitude to staff who are genuinely ill and said he was “shocked” at the improvement in the absence figures being attributed to the change of policy.
“The policy was not fully introduced until at least September 2010,” he said. “Figures provided to trade unions by management showed significant improvement over the year running up to that point.”
He accused the council of not looking properly at the reasons behind absences, but being more concerned with how their absence figures performed in national league tables.
“The unions are concerned that absence dismissal is being used in areas as a way of getting redundancies on the cheap,” he said.
Under the new policy, a formal interview can be called when an employee has been off on three or more separate occasions, a total of six working days for a rolling six-month period.
Photo by Flickr user Sam_catch.