Why benchmarking doesn’t always work

Many UK Absence statistics have been publish in recent months, by a number of high profile human resource management companies such as the CIPD and ACAS. But how useful are they, really?

The variances in the published data have been highlighted in an article by Health Insurance Daily, in which the following conflicting statistics were found to exist (to name but a one example): The annual absence survey published by the CIPD and Simplyhealth printed a national average of 7.7 days off per employee in 2012, costing £600 per employee per year, whilst Pricewaterhouse Coopers found it to be 9.8 days at a cost of £968 per employee per year.

Whilst these surveys bring to light the expense of absence, Honeydew advocate reading the results with a pinch of salt: you should extract the cost model and correlate this to real life expenses (e.g. annual sick pay bill or cost of replacement staff) that apply to your company, not to set targets for your organisation based on the data published.

Whilst benchmarking is sometimes a useful tool, most companies operate in entirely different ways, with entirely different objectives & costs, so it is best not to set targets based on national data that perhaps relates very little to your organisation.

However, it is important to remember that absence has both direct and indirect costs. In national surveys the indirect costs are usually not mentioned due to the difficulty in both identifying and quantifying the causes of these costs for a wide readership.

For a comprehensive cost of absence on your organisation, Honeydew are giving free absence diagnostics to companies that follow our newsletter or our LinkedIn pages. To avoid the hassle of deciphering indirect and direct costs, let us do the hard work for you and help you to improve your business productivity. Don’t waste more time and money, get in touch today!