How RMG & Parcelforce Improved Work Attendance

[brothermagrew]

How Royal Mail Group – and Parcelforce Worldwide – improved work attendance:

“Royal Mail’s analysis indicating that the majority (more than ¾) of sickness absence has causes that are not strictly medical, whether or not it is supported by a doctor’s note.”

Policies initiated and developed following the restructuring at both Royal Mail and Parcelforce Worldwide comprise a blend of ‘carrot’ and ‘stick’ approaches identified by the CBI in its 2006 absence survey as perhaps the most effective approach to tackling the issue. The ‘carrot’ improved dialogue and communication between local managers and their staff and introduced a series of policies to improve workforce health and well being. The ‘stick’ sought to improve the recording of absence, and to enable managers to use the long-established absence rules more effectively.

These procedures were reinvigorated and given a company-wide boost in the winter of 2004-05 under the ‘Absence to Attendance programme’ rolled out across Royal Mail Group and a programme to devolve more responsibility to local managers. This included giving training to managers. Royal Mail Group’s policies place it at the forefront of organisations addressing the medical, social, and psychological causes of absence and seeking to balance support for its employees with a firm approach to tackling the issue.

Royal Mail’s analysis indicating that the majority (more than ¾) of sickness absence has causes that are not strictly medical, whether or not it is supported by a doctor’s note, underpins this approach. The CIPD’s and EEF’s absence surveys of UK organisations corroborate the suggestion that absence has many ‘non-medical’ causes, such as stress and workplace bullying and harassment, personal and family problems, the difficulties of combining work and domestic demands etc. Tackling stress and harassment, offering counselling, looking for mutual adjustments to ease conflicting work and domestic roles are all given weight within the organisation to improve attendance. Likewise, communication plays a key role in helping employees appreciate the effects of their absence on their business’s performance. In most organisations there are those who treat sick absence days as an entitlement. In such cases, if managers are seen to do nothing about it, this behaviour can cause other employees to become resentful or affect their own willingness to attend. It can undermine the morale of other employees. A critical factor in helping Royal Mail and Parcelforce Worldwide to tackle absence has been improvement of the tools enabling line managers to take an active role in getting to the causes of individual absences: to ‘manage rather than medicalise’ sick absence.

Two factors are critical to this: regular contact with employees reporting sick (including return to work one-to-one interviews); and good attendance records which enable line managers to discuss absence behaviour and any patterns with individual staff. This information can support the one-to-one interviews in seeking to establish the underlying causes and identify possible ways in which the manager can help. In respect of the one to ones, the health and well being policies of Parcelforce Worldwide and Royal Mail make an important contribution. They provide local managers with the resources they need to be supportive, whether from the increased authority to manage resources locally, or by means of resources from the medical services company, Atos Origin, or from others summarised in the time chart. They also play an important part in management’s communication with individual employees. They can help explain to employees the effects of absence on the business, the impact on cost and even more on its reputation for reliability. Communication is also undertaken within weekly ‘Work Time Listening and Learning’ (WTLL) sessions, where each line manager engages with his or her team and deals with a range of issues. The fact that the procedures were applied all the way through managerial teams contributed towards Royal Mail and Parcelforce Worldwide’s success in managing absence. Getting absence down and keeping it down requires constant vigilance and effort from the whole management team. Since 2004, both Parcelforce Worldwide and Royal Mail have introduced a wide range of innovative, leading edge health and wellbeing policies on an unprecedented scale. These policies potentially benefit 180,000 employees – one of the UK’s largest workforces.

THE VALUE OF RUDE HEALTH – 34 (A4 pages) Report for Royal Mail Group 2008

Can be viewed at:

http://www.royalmailgroup.com/valueofrudehealth

[BELIAL]

What happens when RM run out of workers?

Ooh I know ,my office

[norbert]

[quote="linkinpark"]Quote. How Royal Mail Group – and Parcelforce Worldwide – improved work attendance.

1/ By first allowing NO appeal from stages 1 2 and 3 till after you are sacked!

2/ Letting it known you will drag it out for as long as possible even upto IT.

3/ Having a compliant and passive CWU HQ to agree to the above!

4/ Employing a private company to brush aside a trained GPs advice with just a phone call.

5/ And the fact they just love to PUNISH people for being SICK including Cancer, heart problems, and bad backs caused by the work itself.

Easy aint it i could do all of that if i did not have a conscience!

Way to go Billy and the rest of you at HQ another job well done!

We had one WTL when an ambitious semi - literate acting manager said " Our Nurses and Doctors can overule your GP - we will have work out of you " - OK RM does have professional skivvers ( quite a few managers amongst them but that's embarrassing for RM ) and there is a sick note culture in this country - but that's too autocratic

The other was a " colourful" line manager saying G****e will be on the blower and G****e will be p*ss*d off ! - there are idiots who regard absence as a game & there's frivilious use of the race / EO card .

The kindest thing you can say about Billy is that RM are good at making things "look straight " on paper but as always RM can be very disingenious , underhand and move the goalposts
and in hindsight , Billy has been made to look very naive .

The best RM propaganda one was " nobody has been sacked for being ill - only for not meeting our strict attendance standards " WTF ? - but these are the sort of people giving the orders and applying pressure , it's just cynical percentages ; some are guilty , many are not ; for every ex postie who causes a stir there's plenty that'll be ground down and won't give RM any problems

If anything RM would like to fasttrack it - they would say it's taking too long to get rid of people - they wanted DDA protection removed - which they are known for "avoiding " if possible - where's there's a will - there's a way - they wanted a new RMAP in distribution - however the CWU balloted and RM backed down as they were obviously spoiling for bigger fights like last year .

It's a clever move using ATOS - it's a common corporate practice - the extended arm , does someone report ATOS to the general medical council ? or cite RM ? if someone did that ATOS would be blaming RM or vice versa .

[norbert]

The CWU leadership also got screwed over by Blue Labour with the Postal Services Act 2000 , for years the CWU wanted RM to have more commercial freedom in the hope it'd get more work for it's members , however "mistakes were made " and everytime the CWU complained about the unelected monster of a regulator in Postcon , Patronizing Pat Hewitt of the DTI would say "well you called for it " - New Labour were clever enough to make sure somebody else fired their bullets for them .

It was Hewitt that wanted RM part sold to the Dutch TNT and the DTI's Stephen Byers who wanted Leighton in to sort out any opposition from the CWU over privatization - he just made sure he didn't get his hands dirty with it .

However :lfo is going - a defeated man